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@(#)date.1 6.3 (Berkeley) 04/13/86

C 4 date - print and set the date date "[ -n ] [ -u ] [ yymmddhhmm [ " . "ss ] ]" 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 -u flag is used to display or set the date in GMT (universal) time. yy represents the last two digits of the year; the first mm is the month number; dd is the day number; hh is the hour number (24 hour system); the second mm is the minute number; . ss is optional and represents the seconds. For example: date 8506131627

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. Date takes care of the conversion to and from local standard and daylight-saving time.

If timed(8) is running to synchronize the clocks of machines in a local area network, date sets the time globally on all those machines unless the -n option is given.

/usr/adm/wtmp to record time-setting. In /usr/adm/messages, date records the name of the user setting the time. gettimeofday(2), utmp(5), timed(8),

TSP: The Time Synchronization Protocol for UNIX 4.3BSD, R. Gusella and S. Zatti

`You are not superuser: date not set' if you try to change the date but are not the super-user. Occasionally, when timed synchronizes the time on many hosts, the setting of a new time value may require more than a few seconds. On these occasions, date prints: `Network time being set'. The message `Communication error with timed' occurs when the communication between date and timed fails. 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.