Time and Date
Another set of useful tools are those that
help you keep track of the time and date. There are two primary
utilities that you will use for this purpose: date and cal.
The "date" utility simply displays the
current time and date (according to the computer...recall that
since you can login to a UNIX machine remotely, the date utility
may not give you your local time if you are not in the same
time zone as the computer you are logged in to). The "date"
utility comes with several options that allow you to format the
date displayed.
Options |
Description |
MMDDhhmmYY |
This option may only be used by the superuser and gives you the
ability to set the date. MM is the month (01-12). DD is the day (01-31).
hh is the hour (00-23). mm is the minute (00-59) and YY is the year
(00-99) |
+%format |
This option specifies how the date is displayed. The valid
formats include
a = weekday (represented as a name)
d = day of month (represented as a digit)
D = mm/dd/yy
h = month (represented as a name)
J = julian date
m = month (represented as a digit)
M = minute
n = newline
r = am/pm
S = second
t = tab
W = Day of week(represented as a digit)
y = last two digits in year
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Check out the date utility in action
The second time telling utility is the "Cal" utility
that displays a calendar through standard output. The "cal" utility is fairly simple
and takes only a month and a year as arguments. If no arguments are specified, it
assumes the current month and year. If no month is specified, the utility will display all the months for the given
year
Check out the following examples.
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