$ date Sun Sep 3 16:00:03 MDT 2017

The date command returns the date which is a novel concept. It also returns the time in just about any way you would like it. Each system has a default format but the date command is very versitile. The date command goes like this:

However, that can be broken down into many different versions. This page documents the date formats available with date.

-d --date=string	Display a date relative to the current date as described by string. Yesterday, tommorrow, x days ago, are a few examples.
-f --f=datefile	read the date formats from a file to produce a date for each line $ cat dateFile.txt 1 day ago 10 minutes ago 5 hours ago tomorrow yesterday $ date -f dateFile.txt Sat Sep 2 17:09:06 MDT 2017 Sun Sep 3 16:59:06 MDT 2017 Sun Sep 3 12:09:06 MDT 2017 Mon Sep 4 17:09:06 MDT 2017 Sat Sep 2 17:09:06 MDT 2017
-ITIMESPEC --iso-8601[=TIMESPEC]	Output date/time in ISO 8601 format
-r --reference=FILE	output the last time FILE was modified
-R --rfc-822	Prints date string iaw RFC 822
-s --set=STRING	Set the time described by string.
-u --utc-universal	Print or set universal coordinated time
-h --help	Displays... ahhh... help?
-v --version	Pretty sure it displays the version of the date software.

Date	Description
D	Date in mm/dd/yy format
x	Date in standard format
Year	Description
C	Century - the first two digits of a four digit year
Y or G	4 digit year e.g. 2017
y or g	2 digit year e.g. 17
Month	Description
b or h	Month abbr name
B	Month full name
m	Month number
Week	Description
W or U	Week number. Number of the week in the year
V	Week number of the year when the begining week has more than 4 days.
Day
a	Week day name abbr
A	Weed day full name
u or w	Number of the day of the week (sun..sat) (0..6)
d	Day number of the month
e	Day number of the month with no preceeding zero
j	Day of the year (julian date)
Time	Description
p	AM or PM
r	12 hour time
R	24 hour time
T or X	24 hour time with seconds
Z	Time zone or offset
Hour	Description
H or k	Hour (0-23)
I or l	Hour (1-12)
Minutes	Description
M	Minute of the hour (0-59)
Seconds	Description
S	Seconds of the minute (0-59)
s	Seconds since the epoch

Date pads all numeric fields with zeros. To prevent this there are two options.

• - Hyphen which removes any preceeding zeros and
• _ Underscore which pads the output with spaces.