(coreutils.info)date invocation

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21.1 ‘date’: Print or set system date and time
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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.
Note: Specifying the Time Zone with ‘TZ’.

   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.