Comments on: FreeBSD Set Date Time and Timezone

By: Pétur Ingi Egilsson

Pétur Ingi Egilsson — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 12:21:03 +0000

Thanks, very useful.

By: X. Benedict

X. Benedict — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:14:34 +0000

I prefer

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney /etc/localtime (for FreeBSD)

rather than copying the file. That way when all the timezone data gets updated, you don’t have to copy it again.

By: Tony Acost

Tony Acost — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:19:09 +0000

This is excellent, i was wondering how to get my clock with the right time. Thanks to this I was able to copy my zoneinfo file into /etc/localtime. Thank you

By: shaffy

shaffy — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 09:55:17 +0000

its really useful.

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:45:03 +0000

Try
ls -l /etc/localtime
OR note down filesize
ls -l /etc/localtime cd /usr/share/timezone find . | grep filesize

By: shake.chen

shake.chen — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:20:44 +0000

in linux , I can use

date -R

I can check the time zone, how to do in freebsd?

By: matt

matt — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:31:37 +0000

date yymmddhh.ss

The key is the period before “.ss”

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:53:07 +0000

You should correct the format it isn’t

“date yymmddhhSS”

it is

“date yymmddhhMM”

The last two digits will be the minutes, not the seconds.

By: Chater

Chater — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 09:24:20 +0000

Very big thanks.
It’s very useful. I was seek this info on many of russian sites, but only your blog is help me :)
So thanxxx again

By: Otuyelu

Otuyelu — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 07:55:59 +0000

While on a FreeBSD system tried using the Linux format to no avail, before running to google where i found your post.

Thanks for posting, a real help

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:00:30 +0000

I did major screwup on production server wanting to paste a date change command to a test machine.

just be careful when you test daylight savings, and make sure you do it on a “test” machine not on your NTP server :)

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:11:25 +0000

Your site was really of much help to me. Thanks a million.

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:15:50 +0000

Gooofy,

This FAQ is about FreeBSD and not about Linux. So the command format is correct and it only works with FreeBSD. Linux specific information:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-set-date-time-from-linux-command-prompt/

By: Gooofy

Gooofy — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:39:30 +0000

That conflicts with the format posted here
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/linux/cmd/cmd.csp?path=d/date

date mmddhhmmyy

By: nixcraft

nixcraft — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 06:59:17 +0000

JaY,

It was typo. The correct syntax is as follows (updated):
date yymmddhhss

Appreciate your post.

By: JaY

JaY — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 06:39:36 +0000

Good Site.. Keep Up the Good Work. Just wanted to point out that you may confuse a noob by showing this example since you put mm at the end of your sample but in your key you list ss as the second. Probly should tell them its the minute.. Just a FYI I know how it is.. nix people jot things down so fast that they don’t even notice it..

date yymmddhhmm
Where,

yy : Year in two digit
mm : Month (1-12)
dd : Day (1-31)
hh : Hours (0..23)
ss : Seconds

For the new person that didn’t know at the end of the string its the minute .. even though it looks like it asks for the month in this example.

JaY