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The date command is fundamental to understanding time options on Linux. It may sound odd, but you must use the date command to see the time on Linux: $ date For example, how long does it take to recursively list all the files in a directory? $ time ls -Rl dir/* To start with, the time command on Linux doesn’t tell the time: $ timeīecause time is a timer for measuring how long a process runs. Any editor will work, but nano or vi is the normal choice.Telling the time on Linux is more complicated than it might seem at first glance.
#Linux setdate manual#
To write the current system time to the hardware clock so that it can be recovered on subsequent restarts of the system, correct the system time as above, then use the command hwclock -systohc to save it to hardware (see the hwclock manual page for more options). See also the time-admin program in gnome-system-tools package. Most desktop environments provide a date/time configuration utility. When the system boots, it has no concept of absolute time and will populate the system time with the date and time read from the hardware clock, thus to ensure that the time set using date is kept across reboots it has to be saved to the hardware clock.
#Linux setdate software#
software clock) but has no effect on the underlying hardware clock (aka. Note, using the date command only sets the runtime system time (aka. The above two commands set the system date to second of November, 1998, and system time to eight minutes past nine, PM.
#Linux setdate iso#
The -set argument examples below is specified in the ISO 8601 standard's extended format as YYYY-MM-DD for Year-Month-DayOfMonth, and time of day HH:MM:SS using 24 hour clock. You can read the man page of date, or use the example below for one possible and very useful format. However, when using the -set argument date accepts the date and time in many formats. When setting the system time manually using date directly, the required time specification format may be confusing (by POSIX convention has to be MMDDhhmmYYYY).
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To see the time in the UTC timezone, use the command date -utc (or shorthand date -u). To see the time on a Debian GNU/Linux system, use the command date, without arguments it will show system time respecting the currently defined timezone.
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