Gnu/coreutils/date-invocation
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21.1 date: Print or set system date and time
Synopses:
date [option]… [+format] date [-u|--utc|--universal] [ MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss] ]
Invoking date with no format argument is equivalent to invoking
it with a default format that depends on the LC_TIME locale category.
In the default C locale, this format is ‘'+%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y'’,
so the output looks like ‘Thu Mar 3 13:47:51 PST 2005’.
Normally, date uses the time zone rules indicated by the
TZ environment variable, or the system default rules if TZ
is not set. See [https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html#TZ-Variable Specifying the Time Zone with
TZ] in The GNU C Library Reference Manual.
If given an argument that starts with a ‘+’, date prints the
current date and time (or the date and time specified by the
--date option, see below) in the format defined by that argument,
which is similar to that of the strftime function. Except for
conversion specifiers, which start with ‘%’, characters in the
format string are printed unchanged. The conversion specifiers are
described below.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.
| • Time conversion specifiers | %[HIklMNpPrRsSTXzZ] | |
| • Date conversion specifiers | %[aAbBcCdDeFgGhjmuUVwWxyY] | |
| • Literal conversion specifiers | %[%nt] | |
| • Padding and other flags | Pad with zeros, spaces, etc. | |
| • Setting the time | Changing the system clock. | |
| • Options for date | Instead of the current time. | |
| • Date input formats | Specifying date strings. | |
| • Examples of date | Examples. |
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