So time-date CTL nowadays is the preferred utility
for managing time.
But there's also date.
As I mentioned, don't use it to set time.
Better use time-date CTL.
But date is useful because of the many options
it offers to print time in a specific format.
You specify the formatting string,
starting with the plus and percent
with all the formatting characters.
Let me show you what these formatting characters are
doing.
So when I use date, this is what I'm getting.
I'm from the Netherlands.
And in the Netherlands, we like two-digit day, hyphen,
two-digit month, hyphen, two-digit year.
So you would get something like this.
But there are many formatting options.
For an impression, have a look at the man page of date.
Scroll down a little bit.
This is what you are looking for,
the format, interpreted sequences, all of these.
What I'm going to show you now is date plus percent,
uppercase A, percent D, percent uppercase B, percent Y.
Because there is spaces in the string,
the double quotes are mandatory.
And there we can see in a more readable format
that we are Thursday, 29th of May, 2025.
That's the most useful stuff that you should
do with the date command nowadays.