NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | EXAMPLES | DATE STRING | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COPYRIGHT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

DATE(1)                         User Commands                        DATE(1)

NAME         top

       date - print or set the system date and time

SYNOPSIS         top

       date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]
       date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]

DESCRIPTION         top

       Display the current time in the given FORMAT, or set the system date.
       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options
       too.
       -d, --date=STRING
              display time described by STRING, not 'now'
       --debug
              annotate the parsed date, and warn about questionable usage to
              stderr
       -f, --file=DATEFILE
              like --date; once for each line of DATEFILE
       -I[FMT], --iso-8601[=FMT]
              output date/time in ISO 8601 format.  FMT='date' for date only
              (the default), 'hours', 'minutes', 'seconds', or 'ns' for date
              and time to the indicated precision.  Example:
              2006-08-14T02:34:56-06:00
       -R, --rfc-email
              output date and time in RFC 5322 format.  Example: Mon, 14 Aug
              2006 02:34:56 -0600
       --rfc-3339=FMT
              output date/time in RFC 3339 format.  FMT='date', 'seconds',
              or 'ns' for date and time to the indicated precision.
              Example: 2006-08-14 02:34:56-06:00
       -r, --reference=FILE
              display the last modification time of FILE
       -s, --set=STRING
              set time described by STRING
       -u, --utc, --universal
              print or set Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
       --help display this help and exit
       --version
              output version information and exit
       FORMAT controls the output.  Interpreted sequences are:
       %%     a literal %
       %a     locale's abbreviated weekday name (e.g., Sun)
       %A     locale's full weekday name (e.g., Sunday)
       %b     locale's abbreviated month name (e.g., Jan)
       %B     locale's full month name (e.g., January)
       %c     locale's date and time (e.g., Thu Mar  3 23:05:25 2005)
       %C     century; like %Y, except omit last two digits (e.g., 20)
       %d     day of month (e.g., 01)
       %D     date; same as %m/%d/%y
       %e     day of month, space padded; same as %_d
       %F     full date; same as %Y-%m-%d
       %g     last two digits of year of ISO week number (see %G)
       %G     year of ISO week number (see %V); normally useful only with %V
       %h     same as %b
       %H     hour (00..23)
       %I     hour (01..12)
       %j     day of year (001..366)
       %k     hour, space padded ( 0..23); same as %_H
       %l     hour, space padded ( 1..12); same as %_I
       %m     month (01..12)
       %M     minute (00..59)
       %n     a newline
       %N     nanoseconds (000000000..999999999)
       %p     locale's equivalent of either AM or PM; blank if not known
       %P     like %p, but lower case
       %q     quarter of year (1..4)
       %r     locale's 12-hour clock time (e.g., 11:11:04 PM)
       %R     24-hour hour and minute; same as %H:%M
       %s     seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
       %S     second (00..60)
       %t     a tab
       %T     time; same as %H:%M:%S
       %u     day of week (1..7); 1 is Monday
       %U     week number of year, with Sunday as first day of week (00..53)
       %V     ISO week number, with Monday as first day of week (01..53)
       %w     day of week (0..6); 0 is Sunday
       %W     week number of year, with Monday as first day of week (00..53)
       %x     locale's date representation (e.g., 12/31/99)
       %X     locale's time representation (e.g., 23:13:48)
       %y     last two digits of year (00..99)
       %Y     year
       %z     +hhmm numeric time zone (e.g., -0400)
       %:z    +hh:mm numeric time zone (e.g., -04:00)
       %::z   +hh:mm:ss numeric time zone (e.g., -04:00:00)
       %:::z  numeric time zone with : to necessary precision (e.g., -04,
              +05:30)
       %Z     alphabetic time zone abbreviation (e.g., EDT)
       By default, date pads numeric fields with zeroes.  The following
       optional flags may follow '%':
       -      (hyphen) do not pad the field
       _      (underscore) pad with spaces
       0      (zero) pad with zeros
       ^      use upper case if possible
       #      use opposite case if possible
       After any flags comes an optional field width, as a decimal number;
       then an optional modifier, which is either E to use the locale's
       alternate representations if available, or O to use the locale's
       alternate numeric symbols if available.

EXAMPLES         top

       Convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to a date
              $ date --date='@2147483647'
       Show the time on the west coast of the US (use tzselect(1) to find
       TZ)
              $ TZ='America/Los_Angeles' date
       Show the local time for 9AM next Friday on the west coast of the US
              $ date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 09:00 next Fri'

DATE STRING         top

       The --date=STRING is a mostly free format human readable date string
       such as "Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:21:42 -0800" or "2004-02-29 16:21:42" or
       even "next Thursday".  A date string may contain items indicating
       calendar date, time of day, time zone, day of week, relative time,
       relative date, and numbers.  An empty string indicates the beginning
       of the day.  The date string format is more complex than is easily
       documented here but is fully described in the info documentation.

AUTHOR         top

       Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS         top

       GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report date translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU
       GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
       There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO         top

       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/date>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) date invocation'

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project can
       be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see 
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained from
       the tarball coreutils-8.27.tar.xz fetched from 
       ⟨http://www.gnutls.org/download.html⟩ on 2017-07-05.  If you discover
       any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
       you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
       to man-pages@man7.org
GNU coreutils 8.27               March 2017                          DATE(1)

Pages that refer to this page: gawk(1)locale(1)pmdashping(1)pmdate(1)timedatectl(1)clock_getres(2)gettimeofday(2)stime(2)time(2)ctime(3)difftime(3)posix_spawn(3)strftime(3)tzset(3)rtc(4)locale(5)utmp(5)lvmreport(7)time(7)hwclock(8)rtcwake(8)