CentOS 7 /RHEL 7: How To Change The Date And Time Using Date Command

This post I will show you how to change the current date and time for your CentOS 7 Or RHEL 7 system using “date” command.

The “date” command can be used to display and set the current date and time .it is also used to display date or time information in a custom format in your automation scripts.

In the previous post, I wrote a guide to change the current date and time using “timedatectl” command. see also:

Changing the date and time using timedatectl command

CentOS 7 Displaying the Current date and time using “date” command

If you want to check the current date and time, just issue the “date” command in the command line interface:

date

Outputs:

[root@devops Desktop]# date
Tue Dec  9 04:22:51 CET 2019

The above output will display the local time of you system, if you want to print the Universal Time(UTC), need to pass the “-u” or “–utc” option, such as:

date --utc

output:

[root@devops Desktop]# date --utc
Tue Dec  9 03:29:03 UTC 2014

You can also use the FORMAT to controls the output of date command.

date +"<FORMAT>"

The FORMAT control sequence are below:

%%     a literal %
%a     locale's abbreviated weekday name (e.g., Sun)
%A     locale's full weekday name (e.g., Sunday)
%b     locale's abbreviated month name (e.g., Jan)
%B     locale's full month name (e.g., January)
%c     locale's date and time (e.g., Thu Mar  3 23:05:25 2005)
%C     century; like %Y, except omit last two digits (e.g., 20)
%d     day of month (e.g., 01)
%D     date; same as %m/%d/%y
%e     day of month, space padded; same as %_d
%F     full date; same as %Y-%m-%d
%g     last two digits of year of ISO week number (see %G)
%G     year of ISO week number (see %V); normally useful only with %V
%h     same as %b
%H     hour (00..23)
...

Example: using “%F” sequence to control the output

[root@devops Desktop]# date +"%F"
2018-07-09

CentOS 7 Changing the Current Date

Issue the fllowing command to change the current date of your system:

date -s <YYYY-MM-DD>

Example: change the current date to “2018-10-28”

[root@devops Desktop]# date -s 2018-10-28
Tue Oct 28 00:00:00 CET 2018

[root@devops Desktop]# date
Tue Oct 28 00:00:01 CET 2018

CentOS 7 Changing the Current Time

If you want to change the curret time, issue the following command:

date -s <HH:MM:SS>

Example:changing the current time to “13:23:45”

[root@devops Desktop]# date -s 13:23:45
Tue Dec  9 13:23:45 CET 2018

[root@devops Desktop]# date
Tue Dec  9 13:23:46 CET 2018