Setting Date and Time on a Debian Server

Computers have a clock to keep time. Usually there is a hardware clock with battery backup to keep time when the computer is off. The operating system (for example Linux) runs its own clock, and from this clock comes the time shown by commands such as date in Linux and time in DOS.

The hardware clock is usually accurate enough, provided that the battery has not run out. If the time shown by the computer when you turn it on is wrong by several months or years, it is worth checking if the battery is still usable.

The "software" clock in the operating system usually has drift, either systematic or random. This drift means the clock runs too fast or too slow. For this reason it is nesessary to use some accurate time source to syncronize the operating system clock if accurate time is needed.

To see the time on Debian GNU/Linux, use the command date. For example

$ date
Fri Oct 23 04:45:51 EEST 1998

The above command shows the day of the week, the month, the day of the month, the time, the time zone and the year. The time zone also shows whether Daylight Saving Time is in use (in the example, the base time zone is EET,and the extra S means Saving).

In Debian GNU/Linux and other Unix, the command time does not show time. It is used to time command excecutions. If you have some command that takes a fair amount of time to execute, and you do not feel like standing by with a stopwatch, you can see how long it took by running the command as argument to time. This example may clear things up:

$ time sleep 60

real 1m0.045s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

Setting Dates on a Debian Server

date --set 2006-03-14
date --set 12:02:0

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