Windows command line date command

Regionally independent date time parsing

The output format of %DATE% and of the dir command is regionally dependent and thus neither robust nor smart. date.exe (part of UnxUtils) delivers any date and time information in any thinkable format. You may also extract the date/time information from any file with date.exe.

Examples: (in a cmd-script use %% instead of %)

date.exe +"%Y-%m-%d"
2009-12-22

date.exe +"%T"
18:55:03

date.exe +"%Y%m%d %H%M%S: Any text"
20091222 185503: Any text

date.exe +"Text: %y/%m/%d-any text-%H.%M"
Text: 09/12/22-any text-18.55

Command: date.exe +"%m-%d """%H %M %S """"
07-22 «18:55:03″`

The date/time information from a reference file:
date.exe -r c:\file.txt +"The timestamp of file.txt is: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

Using it in a CMD script to get year, month, day, time information:

for /f "tokens=1,2,3,4,5,6* delims=," %%i in ('C:\Tools\etc\date.exe +"%%y,%%m,%%d,%%H,%%M,%%S"') do set yy=%%i& set mo=%%j& set dd=%%k& set hh=%%l& set mm=%%m& set ss=%%n

Using it in a CMD script to get a timestamp in any required format:

for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('C:\Tools\etc\date.exe +"%%y-%%m-%%d %%H:%%M:%%S"') do set timestamp=%%i

Extracting the date/time information from any reference file.

for /f "tokens=1,2,3,4,5,6* delims=," %%i in ('C:\Tools\etc\date.exe -r file.txt +"%%y,%%m,%%d,%%H,%%M,%%S"') do set yy=%%i& set mo=%%j& set dd=%%k& set hh=%%l& set mm=%%m& set ss=%%n

Adding to a file its date/time information:

for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('C:\Tools\etc\date.exe -r file.txt +"%%y-%%m-%%d.%%H%%M%%S"') do ren file.txt file.%%i.txt

date.exe is part of the free GNU tools which need no installation.

NOTE: Copying date.exe into any directory which is in the search path may cause other scripts to fail that use the Windows built-in date command.

This post explains how to get current date and time from command prompt or in a batch file.

How to get date and time in a batch file

Below is a sample batch script which gets current date and time
Datetime.cmd

@echo off

for /F "tokens=2" %%i in ('date /t') do set mydate=%%i
set mytime=%time%
echo Current time is %mydate%:%mytime%

When we run the above batch file

C:\>datetime.cmd
Current time is 08/12/2015:22:57:24.62
C:\>

Get date from command line

To print today’s date on the command prompt, we can run date /t.

c:\>date /t
Thu 05/14/2015
c:\>

Just running date without any arguments prints the current date and then prompts to enter a new date if the user wants to reset it.

c:\>date
The current date is: Sat 05/16/2015
Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy)
c:\>

In addition to date command, we also have an environment variable using which we can find today’s date.

c:\>echo %date%
Sun 05/17/2015

How to get only the date in MM/DD/YYYY format?

You may want to exclude the day (like ‘Sun’ in the above example) and print only the date in MM/DD/YYYY format. The below command works for the same.

for /F "tokens=2" %i in ('date /t') do echo %i

Example:

c:\>for /F "tokens=2" %i in ('date /t') do echo %i
05/14/2015
c:\>

Get time from command prompt

Similar to date command, we have the command time which lets us find the current system time. Some examples below.

c:\>time /t
11:17 PM

c:\>time
The current time is: 23:17:18.57
Enter the new time:
c:\>

As you can see, the command prints the time in different formats. It prints in 12 hour format when /t is added and in 24 hours format without /t

We can also get the current time from environment variables.

c:\>echo %time%
23:23:51.62
c:\>

Get date and time

c:\>echo  %date%-%time%
Sun 05/17/2015-23:21:03.34

Very easy to get the date and time, actually:

set Year=
for /f "skip=2" %%x in ('wmic Path Win32_LocalTime get Year^,Month^,Day^,Hour^,Minute^,Second /Format:List') do (
  if not defined Year set %%x
)

I’m assuming local time here. If you need UTC, adapt it accordingly.

Your format makes things more complicated. Apologies if I get something wrong here, I’m not familiar with am/pm formats.

if %Hour% LSS 12 (
  set ampm=AM
  if %Hour%==0 set Hour=12
) else (
  set ampm=PM
  set /a Hour-=12
)

We need a few leading zeroes:

if %Month% LSS 10 set Month=0%Month%
if %Day% LSS 10 set Day=0%Day%
if %Minute% LSS 10 set Minute=0%Minute%
if %Hour% LSS 10 set Hour=0%Hour%

Then it’s time to assemble the parts:

set Timestamp=%Month%-%Day%-%Year% %Hour%:%Minute% %ampm%

_{(Just a random note: Why on earth would you want that timestamp format?)}