NAME
date - print and set the date

SYNOPSIS
date [-nu] [-d dst] [-t minutes_west] [yymmddhhmm [.ss] ]

DESCRIPTION
If no arguments are given, the current date and time are printed.
Providing an argument will set the desired date; only the superuser
can set the date. The -d and -t flags set the kernel’s values for
daylight savings time and minutes west of GMT. If dst is non-zero,
future calls to gettimeofday(2) will return a non-zero tz_dsttime.
Minutes_west provides the number of minutes returned by future
calls to gettimeofday(2) in tz_minuteswest. The -u flag is used to
display or set the date in GMT (universal) time. yy represents the
last two digits of the year; the first mm is the month number; dd
is the day number; hh is the hour number (24 hour system); the
second mm is the minute number; .ss is optional and represents the
seconds. For example:

date 8506131627

sets the date to June 13 1985, 4:27 PM. The year, month and day
may be omitted; the default values will be the current ones. The
system operates in GMT. Date takes care of the conversion to and
from local standard and daylight-saving time.

If timed(8) is running to synchronize the clocks of machines in a
local area network, date sets the time globally on all those
machines unless the -n option is given.

FILES
/usr/adm/wtmp to record time-setting. In /usr/adm/messages, date
records the name of the user setting the time.

SEE ALSO
gettimeofday(2), utmp(5), timed(8)

DIAGNOSTICS
Exit status is 0 on success, 1 on complete failure to set the date,
and 2 on successfully setting the local date but failing globally.

Occasionally, when timed synchronizes the time on many hosts, the
setting of a new time value may require more than a few seconds.
On these occasions, date prints: ‘Network time being set’. The
message ‘Communication error with timed’ occurs when the
communication between date and timed fails.