date(1)

NAME
date - show and set date and time

SYNOPSIS
date [ -u ] [ -c ] [ -r seconds ] [ +format ] [ [yyyy]mmddhhmm[yy][.ss] ]

DESCRIPTION
The date command without arguments writes the date and time to the standard output in the form
Sat Mar 8 14:54:40 EST 2025
with EST replaced by the local time zone's abbreviation (or by the abbreviation for the time zone specified in the TZ environment variable if set). The exact output format depends on the locale.

If a command-line argument starts with a plus sign (the rest of the argument is used as a format that is processed by strftime(3) to determine what to output; a newline character is appended. For example, the shell command:
date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z"
outputs a line like instead.

These options are available:

-u or -c
    Use Universal Time when setting and showing the date and time.

-r seconds
    Output the date that corresponds to seconds past the epoch of 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, where seconds should be an integer, either decimal, octal (leading 0), or hexadecimal (leading 0x), preceded by an optional sign.

FILES
/etc/localtime    local timezone file
/usr/lib/locale/L/LC_TIME    description of time locale L
/usr/share/zoneinfo    timezone directory
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC    for UTC leap seconds

SEE ALSO
strftime(3).