Many ways to use the date command on Linux

$ date +%s
1746203311

You can also convert a timestamp back to a human-friendly date:

$ date -d @1746203311
Fri May  2 12:28:31 PM EDT 2025

The date -u commands displays the date and time in UTC (coordinated universal time):

$ date -u
Fri May  2 04:30:55 PM UTC 2025

You can display the date in ISO 8601 format like this:

$ date --iso-8601
2025-05-02

You can reach back and forward with the date command as in these examples:

$ date --date="next Friday"
Fri May  9 12:00:00 AM EDT 2025
$ date --date="3 months ago"
Sun Feb  2 11:36:28 AM EST 2025

In fact, you can be exceedingly detailed in your requests as shown in the example below.

$ date --date="2 years 4 months 1 week 3 days 7 hours 59 minutes ago"
Sun Sep 12 06:38:26 PM EDT 2027

The date command can provide a date-specific time stamp for file backups with a command like one of these:

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