20 comment

1. 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

2. JaY,

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

   Appreciate your post.

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

   date mmddhhmmyy

4. 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:
   https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-set-date-time-from-linux-command-prompt/

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

6. 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 :)

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. date yymmddhh.ss

    The key is the period before “.ss”

11. in linux , I can use

    date -R

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

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

12. its really useful.

13. 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

14. 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.

15. Thanks, very useful.

16. Note that Matt’s format is correct, you need to change the blog post to show a dot before ss or FreeBSD (tested on 9.0) will give error “nonexistent time”.

17. Note that cron will continue to use the old system time zone until you restart it:

    # service cron restart
    

18. get_current_timzone() {
     CURRENT_TIMEZONE="$(md5 /etc/localtime | awk '{print $4}')"
     find /usr/share/zoneinfo | while read LINE; do FOUND_TIMEZONE="$(md5 ${LINE} | awk '{print $4}')" if [ "${CURRENT_TIMEZONE}" == "${FOUND_TIMEZONE}" ]; then echo ${LINE} | sed -E 's|/usr/share/zoneinfo/||' fi done
    }
    
    root@Host-10 [~]$ get_current_timzone
    

19. Dear,

    After copying your timezone file to /etc/localtime do not forgot to run “adjkerntz -a” (man adjkerntz)

    Regards,

    l2f

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