How can I display the current time & date setting?

How can I display the current time configuration, like the time zone, in Ubuntu?

7 Answers

I don't know of a single file, but this may give you the info needed:

cat /etc/timezone grep UTC /etc/default/rcS date # hardware clock sudo hwclock --show 

Best example (IMHO) using timedatectl (in command-line/terminal):

$ timedatectl Local time: Thu 2014-07-24 19:51:23 IST Universal time: Thu 2014-07-24 14:21:23 UTC Timezone: Asia/Kolkata (IST, +0530) NTP enabled: no NTP synchronized: no RTC in local TZ: no DST active: n/a 

Visit the manpage for more settings and further information.

For me, date works fine:

Fri 22 Nov 2019 04:31:50 PM UTC

Check out info date, and for example date +'%z'

For the time zone, you can use geolocation:

$ curl America/Chicago 

Or:

$ curl America/Chicago 

If you need a formatted area and time zone, you can use:

$ grep `date +%Z` /etc/timezone Etc/UTC 

If you have PowerShell installed:

PS> Get-TimeZone Id : Europe/Vilnius DisplayName : (UTC+02:00) Eastern European Standard Time StandardName : Eastern European Standard Time DaylightName : Eastern European Summer Time BaseUtcOffset : 02:00:00 SupportsDaylightSavingTime : True 

I suspect this won't be popular answer in a Linux community, but I really like the verb-noun convention. It makes it easier for me to remember commands, and it will also work on all distributions with PowerShell installed :)

Documentation for the Get-TimeZone cmdlet