.\" 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 6.2 (Berkeley) %G%
date \- print and set the date
.RB "[ -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.
flag is used to display or set the date in GMT (universal) time.
represents the last two digits of the year;
is the hour number (24 hour system);
is optional and represents the seconds.
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.
takes care of the conversion to and from
local standard and daylight-saving time.
is running to synchronize the clocks of machines in a local
area network, \fIdate\fP sets the time globally on all those
/usr/adm/wtmp to record time-setting.
In /usr/adm/messages, \fIdate\fP records the name of the user
gettimeofday(2), utmp(5), timed(8),
\fITSP: The Time Synchronization Protocol for UNIX 4.3BSD\fP,
`You are not superuser: date not set' if you try to change the date
but are not the super-user.
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.
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.