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This article discusses the methods to display current date and time in a specified format in Bash Scripting. For this purpose, date command is used with multiple options.

Using the Date Command in Bash

An external Bash program called the date command can change or display the system time and date. In addition, it provides a variety of format choices.

By default, every Linux distribution includes the date command. The syntax of the date command is as follows:

date +[format_option]

If we just type the date command with no format options, it will display the complete date and time in a verbose format.

Let's look at the output below:

Additionally, many formatting options can be used with the date command depending on your requirements.

Format options in the date command

Following is a list of format options available for the date command:

These formats can be used to get the date according to the format you require. Let’s see some examples of displaying the date in different formats.

Display date in MM/DD/YYYY format

The following script will display the date in mm-dd-yyyy format. Note that it is case sensitive because uppercase letters have different meanings than lowercase letters.

#!/bin/bash
curr_date=`date +%m/%d/%Y`
echo $curr_date

This will display the following output:

Display date in MM-YYYY format

It is not mandatory to display year, month and day. You can skip any of them based on your requirement.

The following Bash script will display only the month and year in MM-YYYY format:

#!/bin/bash
curr_date=`date +%m-%Y`
echo $curr_date

This will give the following output:

Display the date and time without any punctuation

It is also possible to omit punctuation used as separators in dates. To do this, you can use the following script:

#!/bin/bash
curr_date=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
echo $curr_date

This will give the following output:

Summarize

Date is an inbuilt program in all Unix-like operating systems and apart from displaying the current date, it can also be used with other commands. In this article, we have learned how to use the date command of Bash script and its syntax to display data in various formats.