date(1) — Linux manual page

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 date and time in the given FORMAT.  With -s, or with
       [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]], set the date and time.

       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

       --resolution
              output the available resolution of timestamps Example:
              0.000000001

       -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

       All options that specify the date to display are mutually
       exclusive.  I.e.: --date, --file, --reference, --resolution.

       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; like %+4Y-%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 the Epoch (1970-01-01 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

       +      pad with zeros, and put '+' before future years with >4
              digits

       ^      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:
       <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report any translation bugs to
       <https://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+:
       GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://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 <https://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-9.5.tar.xz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/⟩ on 2024-06-14.  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 [email protected]

GNU coreutils 9.5              March 2024                        DATE(1)

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