DATE(1) General Commands Manual DATE(1)

date - print the date

date [ -u ] [ -n ] [ seconds ]

Prints the date to standard output, in the format:

Wed Jan 12 11:54:06 GMT 2002

The options are

Report Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) rather than local time.
Report the date as the number of seconds since the epoch, 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970.

Current time is obtained by reading /dev/time. The conversion from Greenwich Mean Time to local time depends on the contents of /locale/timezone.

If the optional argument seconds is present, it is used as the time to convert rather than the real time.

/locale/timezone
Current time zone name and adjustments
/locale
A directory containing time zone tables
/dev/time
microseconds since the epoch, 00:00:00 GMT, 1 January 1970

/appl/cmd/date.b

time (1), daytime (2), cons (3)