.\" Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement .\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution. .\" .\" @(#)date.1 6.6 (Berkeley) 04/01/87 .\" .TH DATE 1 "" .UC 4 .SH NAME date \- print and set the date .SH SYNOPSIS .B date .RB "[-nu] [-d dst] [-t minutes_west] [yymmddhhmm [" . "ss] ]" .SH DESCRIPTION If no arguments are given, the current date and time are printed. Providing an argument will set the desired date; only the superuser can set the date. The \fI-d\fP and \fI-t\fP flags set the kernel's values for daylight savings time and minutes west of GMT. If \fIdst\fP is non-zero, future calls to \fIgettimeofday\fP(2) will return a non-zero \fItz_dsttime\fP. \fIMinutes_west\fP provides the number of minutes returned by future calls to \fIgettimeofday\fP(2) in \fItz_minuteswest\fP. The \fI-u\fP flag is used to display or set the date in GMT (universal) time. .I yy represents the last two digits of the year; the first .I mm is the month number; .I dd is the day number; .I hh is the hour number (24 hour system); the second .I mm is the minute number; .BI . ss is optional and represents the seconds. For example: .IP date 8506131627 .PP sets the date to June 13 1985, 4:27 PM. The year, month and day may be omitted; the default values will be the current ones. The system operates in GMT. \fIDate\fP takes care of the conversion to and from local standard and daylight-saving time. .PP If .I timed(8) is running to synchronize the clocks of machines in a local area network, \fIdate\fP sets the time globally on all those machines unless the .B \-n option is given. .SH FILES /usr/adm/wtmp to record time-setting. In /usr/adm/messages, \fIdate\fP records the name of the user setting the time. .SH SEE ALSO gettimeofday(2), utmp(5), timed(8), .br \fITSP: The Time Synchronization Protocol for UNIX 4.3BSD\fP, R. Gusella and S. Zatti .SH DIAGNOSTICS Exit status is 0 on success, 1 on complete failure to set the date, and 2 on successfully setting the local date but failing globally. .PP Occasionally, when \fItimed\fP synchronizes the time on many hosts, the setting of a new time value may require more than a few seconds. On these occasions, \fIdate\fP prints: `Network time being set'. The message `Communication error with timed' occurs when the communication between \fIdate\fP and \fItimed\fP fails. .SH BUGS The system attempts to keep the date in a format closely compatible with VMS. VMS, however, uses local time (rather than GMT) and does not understand daylight-saving time. Thus, if you use both UNIX and VMS, VMS will be running on GMT.