Bash How to Format Date
The easiest way to get a date in YYYY-MM-DD is as follows:
date -I
Output: 2016-06-07
The parameter “I” tells the date command, the ISO date format is required.
Of course, you can also use your own definition. %Y means year, %m means month, and %d means day:
date +%Y-%m-%d
Output: 2016-06-07, the same.
If you want to display also hours:minutes:second, let’s do:
date +%Y-%m-%d:%H:%M:%S
Output: 2016-06-07:17:02:19
You fill the variable date as follows:
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d:%H:%M:%S`
Here are some examples of format control:
- %u – day of week(1..7), 1 is Monday
- %w – day of week(0..6), 0 is Sunday
- %U – week number of year, with Sunday as the first day of the week (00..53)
- %V – week number of year, with Monday as the first day of the week (00..53)
- %s – seconds since 1.1.1970 UTC
- %Y – year
- %y – last two digits of year(00..99)
- %r – locale’s 12-hour clock time
- %R – 24-hour hour and minute