Display the current date and time or set a new date and time.
date [options] [+
format
]
date [-su] [
MMDDHHMM
[[
CC
]
YY
][.
SS
]]
-u displays or sets the time using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The
date command alone displays the current date and time. Using the
+
format argument, you can specify a display format for the date and time. For a complete listing of the format specification, type man date.
To set the date, use
date followed by the date and time in the
MMDDHHMM format, where each character is a digit (
MM is the month,
DD is the day,
HH the hour, and
MM the minutes). You can optionally specify the year (
YY ) and century (
CC ) as well.