format-and-print-the-current-date-and-time.md

Format And Print The Current Date And Time

If I run the date command from the terminal, I get output like the following:

$ date
Fri Jan 22 13:45:44 CST 2021

If I want to format the date output different, perhaps for inclusion in a shell script, I can do something like this:

$ date +"%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S"
2021/01/22 13:47:55

Then I can incorporate that in a script like this:

now() {
  echo "Today: $(date +'%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S')"
}

This page includes some examples and a page of formatting options.