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.
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:
date "+%H:%M:%S %d/%m/%y"
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:
PS1="\@ \w$bk"
Looks like: 11:41 AM ~
A little fancier, enclosed in brackets:
PS1="[ \@ \w$bk ]"
Looks like: [ 11:36 AM ~ ]
Add the user and localhost with the time, all within brackets:
PS1="[ \u on \h \@ \w$bk ]"
Looks like: [ DrPete on LittleSorrel 10:34 AM ~ ]
Reset prompt to default #: PS1="# "
To make the prompt permanently available, add the prompt line of your choice, i.e.,
export PS1="\@ \w$bk "
to ~/.profile .
Can't help it, we are rolling now... add colors, define them in .profile to make them easier to set up:
# Install GNU coreutils
bk="\[\033[0;38m\]" #means no background and white lines
txtBlue="\[\033[0;34m\]" #letter color blue
txtRed="\[\033[0;31m\]" #letter color red
txtCyan="\[\033[1;36m\]" #letter color cyan
txtWhite="\[\033[1;37m\]" #letter color white
txtYellow="\[\033[1;33m\]" #letter color yellow
Then a superfancy colored prompt would be:
PS1="[ $txtYellow\u on $txtCyan\h $txtRed\@ $txtWhite\w$bk ]"
There are a list of command used for time and date:
-
The command
date
$ date Tue Jun 9 18:04:30 EEST 2015
-
The command
zdump
used to echo the time in a specified time zone.$ zdump EEST EEST Tue Jun 9 15:05:17 2015 EEST
-
hwclock
$ sudo hwclock Tue 09 Jun 2015 06:05:55 PM EEST -0.656710 seconds
-
clock but needs to install xview-clients
sudo apt-get install xview-clients
-
using
ntpdate
command.ntpdate
is used to set system time but using withoutsudo
will just print the time and date.$ ntpdate 26 Jun 10:48:34 ntpdate[4748]: no servers can be used, exiting