date command examples

This pages shows examples of using the date command.

Basic date usage

Just type date in the command line:

$ date
Wed 29 Jan 2020 12:15:00 GMT

Using templates for formatting output

There's a whole list of variable names that allow you to format the date command output to exactly your liking.

Things you can do with this formatting feature:

• show only part of the date info - today's day of the week or today's month or year

• rearrange the order of date fields reported by the command

• rearrange the format of reporting a particular thing - showing two digits for year number instead of four, etc

Here's an example:

$ date "+%B %d, %Y"
January 29, 2020

See Also

• date command