til/unix/print-the-current-date-in-human-readable-format.md

Print The Current Date In Human-Readable Format

The date utility by default does a good job of displaying the current date in a human-readable format.

❯ date
Fri Jun  2 11:30:03 CDT 2023

It has some additional info like the time and timezone.

If I just want to see the date with the day of the week, I can call date with a format string that uses special identifiers for each part of the date. This gives me control over exactly how it is displayed. For example, the following format string works for my purposes.

❯ date '+%A %B %d, %Y'
Friday June 02, 2023

The + indicates that it is a user-specified format string and the rest of the special identifiers are defined by strftime.

See man date and man strftime for more details.