How to find the past and future dates using date command

 

 

The "date" command in Linux is used to display the current date and time. But, we can also make the date command to display past and future dates based on the inputs/parameters that we pass to it. Below are some of the ways to find the future and past dates.

 

 

 

1) Normal dates:

Today
$ date +%Y-%m-%d
2012-09-29

 

After 2 days
$ date +%Y-%m-%d -d "2 day"
2012-10-01

 

Before 2 days
$ date +%Y-%m-%d -d "-2 day"
2012-09-27

 

Yesterday
$ date +%Y-%m-%d -d "yesterday"
2012-09-28

 

Tomorrow
$ date +%Y-%m-%d -d "next day"
2012-09-30

 

After 3 weeks
$ date +%Y-%m-%d -d "3 weeks"
2012-10-20

 

Before 3 weeks
$ date +%Y-%m-%d -d "-3 weeks"
2012-09-08

 

One Year 3 days after
$ date -d "1 year 3 days"
Wed Oct  2 02:24:53 CDT 2013

 

Last Sunday what was the date ?
$ date -d 'last sun'
Sun Sep 23 00:00:00 CDT 2012

 

How about coming Sunday?
$ date -d 'sun'
Sun Sep 30 00:00:00 CDT 2012

 

This year, what day does "Independence Day" fall on?
$ date --date='15 Aug' +%A
Wednesday

 

2) GMT Time?
$ date -u
Sat Sep 29 07:27:33 UTC 2012

 

3) Epoch time?

Number of seconds from 1970-01-01 UTC (epoch time,it is the number of seconds elapsed since midnight UTC of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds)
$ date +%s
1348903671

 

The opposite way conversion, from epoch time to date is shown below.
$ date --date '1970-01-01 UTC 1199968580 seconds'
Sat Sep 29 02:27:51 CDT 2012

 

To make the above command as a function which can be used always, you need to do the following steps.

Make the below function in ~/.bash_profile

epochtime () {
date --date '1970-01-01 UTC '$1' seconds'
}

 

So that you can use it as below in the command line or in a script.

$ epochtime 1199968580
Sat Sep 29 02:27:51 CDT 2012