How To Get / Print Current Date in Unix / Linux Shell Script

You can get the current date in a Unix or Linux shell script using the date command. To print the current date, you can use the following syntax:

This will print the date and time in the format Thu Feb 10 16:47:41 PST 2022.

If you want to display only the date and not the time, you can use the following syntax:

This will print the date in the format 2022-02-10.

You can use the + option to specify the format of the date output. For a full list of format codes, see the man page for the date command by typing man date in a terminal window.

Note that the date command outputs the date and time in the local time zone. If you need to display the date and time in a different time zone, you can set the TZ environment variable to the desired time zone before calling the date command. For example:

This will display the date and time in the Pacific Time zone.