Linux show current time

Display Date And Time In Linux

H ow do I display date and time in Linux using the command line and GUI options?

To display date and time under Linux operating system using command prompt use the date command. It can also display the current time / date in the given FORMAT. We can set the system date and time as root user too.

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	Linux with the terminal application
Est. reading time	3 minutes

Syntax

Open a terminal and type the following command:
date

You can format the date as follows in dd-mm-yy format:
date +»%d-%m-%y»

Simply display the current time:
date «+%T»

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To print the date of the day before yesterday, run:
date —date=’2 days ago’
Want to see the day of year of Christmas in the current year? Try:
date —date=’25 Dec’ +%j
Display the current full month name and the day of the month:
date ‘+%B %d’

Display date and time in Linux using the timedatectl

Most modern Linux distro with systemd use the timedatectl command. It is used to query and change the system clock and its settings, and enable or disable time synchronization services. All you have to do is type the following command:
$ timedatectl

TZ environment variable

The TZ environment tells Linux what time zone you are in. Many times when you want to change your time zone temporarily. For example, you might want to print the current date and time in “America/Los_Angeles” timezone even though you are in “Europe/London”. So we can set TZ, give a command like as follows when using TCSH/CSH:
setenv TZ timezone
For BASH/KSH/SH (see export command:
TZ=timezone; export TZ
Another option:
TZ=»America/Los_Angeles» date
TZ=»Asia/Tokyo» date
Use the following command to print a list of all timezones:
timedatectl list-timezones
timedatectl list-timezones | more
## filter out data using the grep command/egrep command ##
timedatectl list-timezones | grep -i Hong_kong
timedatectl list-timezones | grep -i paris
timedatectl list-timezones | grep -E -i ‘paris|london|kolkata’

The TZ Environment Variable on Linux

GUI Tool: Time Administration

The Time Administration Tool allows you to set the time, date and timezone of your system, as well as setting any time server to synchronize your local time server. Type the following command to start time admin tool:
sudo time-admin
## OR ##
time-admin

Fig.01: Linux Date and Time Administration Tool

How to change date and time settings with Gnome based Linux desktop

First, you need to Settings in Activities and then click Details in the sidebar. Make sure you click Date & Time in the sidebar to open the panel:

Conclusion

In this quick tutorial, you learned about the date command that you can use to see or change the date/time under Linux operating systems. We further explained how to use the GUI tools too. The date command has many more options. See man page by typing the following man command:
$ man date

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How To Get / Print Current Date in Unix / Linux Shell Script

H ow do I get the current date in Unix or Linux shell scripting and store it into a shell variable? How do I print the current date using Unix shell script? How can I display the current time in Linux shell script?

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	Linux or Unix
Est. reading time	3 minutes

You need to use the following syntax to print current date and time on screen:

Print current date and time in Unix shell script

To store current date and time to a variable, enter:
now=$(date)
OR
now=`date`

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Print Current Date in Unix

To print this date either use the printf or echo statement:
echo «$now»
echo «Current date: $now»
OR use the printf command:
printf «%s\n» «$now»
OR
printf «Current date and time in Linux %s\n» «$now»

Getting the current date and time in Linux shell script

You can format and display date using the following syntax:

Finding the current date and time in Linux or Unix using the date command

A list of date command format codes

FORMAT code	Description
%%	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)

Sample shell script to display the current date and time

Conclusion

You learned how to display the current date and time on Linux and Unix-like systems. We also explained how to store date or time in a shell variable. For more info see date command man page by typing the following date command or GNU/date help page here:
man date

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How to get date and time using command line interface?

How can I get current date/time in terminal. I mostly start up my system in text(console) mode and need the command to know the current date/time.

9 Answers 9

The date command will show you the date and time.

man date will show you how to control the output to whatever format you need, if you want something other than the standard output. For example:

will output the date and time in the format 14:09:22 09/06/2015

An easier to read version of the man page can be found on Ubuntu Man Pages

Time as the command line prompt:

Looks like: 11:41 AM

A little fancier, enclosed in brackets:

Looks like: [ 11:36 AM

Add the user and localhost with the time, all within brackets:

Looks like: [ DrPete on LittleSorrel 10:34 AM

Reset prompt to default #: PS1=»# «

To make the prompt permanently available, add the prompt line of your choice, i.e.,

Can’t help it, we are rolling now. add colors, define them in .profile to make them easier to set up:

Then a superfancy colored prompt would be:

There are a list of command used for time and date:

The command date

The command zdump used to echo the time in a specified time zone.

clock but needs to install xview-clients

using ntpdate command. ntpdate is used to set system time but using without sudo will just print the time and date.

With Ubuntu 15.04 (systemd) there is also timedatectl which shows you the time and allows you to change it and more in man timedatectl .

Without arguments it gives

And another nice feature that I have used is timedatectl set-ntp true which activates systemd-timesyncd which is inbuild SNTP (Simple Network Time Protocol) client which syncs your clock with remote server.

Although all the answers here are correct, you need to use the date command manually to see the time whenever you want, and the output will mix with normal output of your command. This is mostly ok, but sometime is not practical.

You can add the date command to your prompt which will show a (fixed) clock every time the shell is ready for the command, or you can use one of the terminal multiplexer that have a status line. My preferred one (although I admit the oldest one) is GNU screen.

In console or in a terminal, say via ssh , if you use screen, among zillions of different things you can do (I used to think about screen as unavoidable for working when I had just a text terminal) you have the option — which is normally in the default configuration — of having a clock in the status line:

(The screenshot is on a virtual terminal, but it’s the same on a virtual console).

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System time

This article or section needs expansion.

In an operating system, the time (clock) is determined by three parts: time value, whether it is local time or UTC or something else, time zone, and Daylight Saving Time (DST) if applicable. This article explains what they are and how to read/set them. Two clocks are present on systems: a hardware clock and a system clock which are also detailed in this article.

Standard behavior of most operating systems is:

• Set the system clock from the hardware clock on boot.
• Keep accurate time of the system clock, see #Time synchronization.
• Set the hardware clock from the system clock on shutdown.

Contents

Hardware clock

The hardware clock (a.k.a. the Real Time Clock (RTC) or CMOS clock) stores the values of: Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute, and Seconds. Only 2016, or later, UEFI firmware has the ability to store the timezone, and whether DST is used.

Read hardware clock

Set hardware clock from system clock

The following sets the hardware clock from the system clock. Additionally it updates /etc/adjtime or creates it if not present. See hwclock(8) section «The Adjtime File» for more information on this file as well as the #Time skew section.

System clock

The system clock (a.k.a. the software clock) keeps track of: time, time zone, and DST if applicable. It is calculated by the Linux kernel as the number of seconds since midnight January 1st 1970, UTC. The initial value of the system clock is calculated from the hardware clock, dependent on the contents of /etc/adjtime . After boot-up has completed, the system clock runs independently of the hardware clock. The Linux kernel keeps track of the system clock by counting timer interrupts.

Read clock

To check the current system clock time (presented both in local time and UTC) as well as the RTC (hardware clock):

Set system clock

To set the local time of the system clock directly:

sets the time to May 26th, year 2014, 11:13 and 54 seconds.

Time standard

There are two time standards: localtime and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The localtime standard is dependent on the current time zone, while UTC is the global time standard and is independent of time zone values. Though conceptually different, UTC is also known as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

The standard used by the hardware clock (CMOS clock, the BIOS time) is set by the operating system. By default, Windows uses localtime, macOS uses UTC, other UNIX and UNIX-like systems vary. An OS that uses the UTC standard will generally consider the hardware clock as UTC and make an adjustment to it to set the OS time at boot according to the time zone.

If multiple operating systems are installed on a machine, they will all derive the current time from the same hardware clock: it is recommended to adopt a unique standard for the hardware clock to avoid conflicts across systems and set it to UTC. Otherwise, if the hardware clock is set to localtime, more than one operating system may adjust it after a DST change for example, thus resulting in an over-correction; problems may also arise when traveling between different time zones and using one of the operating systems to reset the system/hardware clock.

The hardware clock can be queried and set with the timedatectl command. You can see the current hardware clock time standard of the Arch system using:

To change the hardware clock time standard to localtime, use:

To revert to the hardware clock being in UTC, type:

These generate /etc/adjtime automatically and update the RTC accordingly; no further configuration is required.

During kernel startup, at the point when the RTC driver is loaded, the system clock may be set from the hardware clock. Whether this occurs depends on the hardware platform, the version of the kernel and kernel build options. If this does occur, at this point in the boot sequence, the hardware clock time is assumed to be UTC and the value of /sys/class/rtc/rtcN/hctosys (N=0,1,2. ) will be set to 1.

Later, the system clock is set again from the hardware clock by systemd, dependent on values in /etc/adjtime . Hence, having the hardware clock using localtime may cause some unexpected behavior during the boot sequence; e.g system time going backwards, which is always a bad idea (there is a lot more to it). To avoid it systemd will only synchronize back, if the hardware clock is set to UTC and keep the kernel uninformed about the local timezone. As a consequence timestamps on a FAT filesystem touched by the Linux system will be in UTC.

UTC in Microsoft Windows

To dual boot with Windows it is recommended to configure Windows to use UTC, rather than Linux to use localtime. (Windows by default uses localtime [1].)

It can be done by a simple registry fix: Open regedit and add a DWORD value with hexadecimal value 1 to the registry:

You can do this from an Administrator Command Prompt running:

Alternatively, create a *.reg file (on the desktop) with the following content and double-click it to import it into registry:

Should Windows ask to update the clock due to DST changes, let it. It will leave the clock in UTC as expected, only correcting the displayed time.

The #Hardware clock and #System clock time may need to be updated after setting this value.

If you are having issues with the offset of the time, try reinstalling tzdata and then setting your time zone again:

Historical notes

For really old Windows, the above method fails, due to Windows bugs. More precisely,

• For 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and older builds of Windows 10, there was a bug that made it necessary to have a QWORD value with hexadecimal value of 1 instead of a DWORD value. This bug has been fixed in newer builds and now only DWORD works.
• Before Vista SP2, there is a bug that resets the clock to localtime after resuming from the suspend/hibernation state.
• For XP and older, there is a bug related to the daylight saving time. See [2] for details.
• For even older versions of Windows, you might want to read https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/

mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html — the functionality was not even documented nor officially supported then.

For these operating systems, it is recommended to use localtime.

UTC in Ubuntu

Ubuntu and its derivatives have the hardware clock set to be interpreted as in «localtime» if Windows was detected on any disk during Ubuntu installation. This is apparently done deliberately to allow new Linux users to try out Ubuntu on their Windows computers without editing the registry.

For changing this behavior, see above.

Time zone

To check the current zone defined for the system:

To list available zones:

To set your time zone:

This will create an /etc/localtime symlink that points to a zoneinfo file under /usr/share/zoneinfo/ . In case you choose to create the link manually (for example during chroot where timedatectl will not work), keep in mind that it must be a symbolic link, as specified in archlinux(7) [dead link 2021-02-08] :

Setting based on geolocation

To set the timezone automatically based on the IP address location, one can use a geolocation API to retrieve the timezone, for example curl https://ipapi.co/timezone , and pass the output to timedatectl set-timezone for automatic setting. Some geo-IP APIs that provide free or partly free services are listed below:

Update timezone every time NetworkManager connects to a network

Alternatively, the tool tzupdate AUR automatically sets the timezone based on the geolocation of the IP address. This comparison of the most popular IP geolocation apis may be helpful in deciding which API to use in production.

Time skew

Every clock has a value that differs from real time (the best representation of which being International Atomic Time); no clock is perfect. A quartz-based electronic clock keeps imperfect time, but maintains a consistent inaccuracy. This base ‘inaccuracy’ is known as ‘time skew’ or ‘time drift’.

When the hardware clock is set with hwclock , a new drift value is calculated in seconds per day. The drift value is calculated by using the difference between the new value set and the hardware clock value just before the set, taking into account the value of the previous drift value and the last time the hardware clock was set. The new drift value and the time when the clock was set is written to the file /etc/adjtime overwriting the previous values. The hardware clock can therefore be adjusted for drift when the command hwclock —adjust is run; this also occurs on shutdown but only if the hwclock daemon is enabled, hence for Arch systems which use systemd, this does not happen.

If the hardware clock keeps losing or gaining time in large increments, it is possible that an invalid drift has been recorded (but only applicable, if the hwclock daemon is running). This can happen if you have set the hardware clock time incorrectly or your time standard is not synchronized with a Windows or macOS install. The drift value can be removed by first removing the file /etc/adjtime , then setting the correct hardware clock and system clock time. You should then check if your time standard is correct.

The software clock is very accurate but like most clocks is not perfectly accurate and will drift as well. Though rarely, the system clock can lose accuracy if the kernel skips interrupts. There are some tools to improve software clock accuracy:

Time synchronization

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol for synchronizing the clocks of computer systems over packet-switched, variable-latency data networks. The following are implementations of NTP available for Arch Linux:

• Chrony — A client and server that is roaming friendly and designed specifically for systems that are not online all the time.

https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/ || chrony

• ConnMan — A lightweight network manager with NTP support.

https://01.org/connman (waybackmachine) || connman

• Network Time Protocol daemon — The reference implementation of the protocol, especially recommended to be used on time servers. It can also adjust the interrupt frequency and the number of ticks per second to decrease system clock drift, and will cause the hardware clock to be re-synchronised every 11 minutes.

https://www.ntp.org/ || ntp

• ntpclient — A simple command-line NTP client.

http://doolittle.icarus.com/ntpclient/ || ntpclientAUR

• NTPsec — A fork of NTPd, focused on security.

https://ntpsec.org/ || ntpsecAUR

• OpenNTPD — Part of the OpenBSD project and implements both a client and a server.

https://www.openntpd.org/ || openntpd

• sntp — An SNTP client that comes with NTPd. It supersedes ntpdate and is recommended in non-server environments.

https://www.ntp.org/ || ntp

• systemd-timesyncd — A simple SNTP daemon that only implements a client side, focusing only on querying time from one remote server. It should be more than appropriate for most installations.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ || systemd

Per-user/session or temporary settings

For some use cases it may be useful to change the time settings without touching the global system values. For example to test applications relying on the time during development or adjusting the system time zone when logging into a server remotely from another zone.

To make an application «see» a different date/time than the system one, you can use the faketime(1) utility (from libfaketime ).

If instead you want an application to «see» a different time zone than the system one, set the TZ environment variable, for example:

This is different than just setting the time, as for example it allows to test the behavior of a program with positive or negative UTC offset values, or the effects of DST changes when developing on systems in a non-DST time zone.

Another use case is having different time zones set for different users of the same system: this can be accomplished by setting the TZ variable in the shell’s configuration file, see Environment variables#Defining variables.

Troubleshooting

Clock shows a value that is neither UTC nor local time

This might be caused by a number of reasons. For example, if your hardware clock is running on local time, but timedatectl is set to assume it is in UTC, the result would be that your timezone’s offset to UTC effectively gets applied twice, resulting in wrong values for your local time and UTC.

To force your clock to the correct time, and to also write the correct UTC to your hardware clock, follow these steps:

• Setup ntpd (enabling it as a service is not necessary).
• Set your time zone correctly.
• Run ntpd -qg to manually synchronize your clock with the network, ignoring large deviations between local UTC and network UTC.
• Run hwclock —systohc to write the current software UTC time to the hardware clock.

Tips and tricks

fake-hwclock

alarm-fake-hwclock designed especially for system without battery backed up RTC, it includes a systemd service which on shutdown saves the current time and on startup restores the saved time, thus avoiding strange time travel errors.

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