date [option]... [+format] date [-u|--utc|--universal] [ MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss] ]
Invoking date with no format argument is equivalent to invoking it with a default format that depends on the LC_TIME locale category. In the default C locale, this format is ‘'+%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y'’, so the output looks like ‘Thu Mar 3 13:47:51 PST 2005’.
Normally, date uses the time zone rules indicated by the TZ environment variable, or the system default rules if TZ is not set. See Specifying the Time Zone with TZ.
If given an argument that starts with a ‘+’, date prints the
current date and time (or the date and time specified by the
--date option, see below) in the format defined by that argument,
which is similar to that of the strftime
function. Except for
conversion specifiers, which start with ‘%’, characters in the
format string are printed unchanged. The conversion specifiers are
described below.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.