How can I get the current system date and time using a command prompt?

Question

I would like to get the current system date and time using a command prompt.
How do I get the date to be in a specific format, MM-DD-YYYY HH:MIN AM/PM?

Answer 1

Very easy to get the date and time, actually:

set Year=
for /f "skip=2" %%x in ('wmic Path Win32_LocalTime get Year^,Month^,Day^,Hour^,Minute^,Second /Format:List') do (
  if not defined Year set %%x
)

I'm assuming local time here. If you need UTC, adapt it accordingly.

Your format makes things more complicated. Apologies if I get something wrong here, I'm not familiar with am/pm formats.

if %Hour% LSS 12 (
  set ampm=AM
  if %Hour%==0 set Hour=12
) else (
  set ampm=PM
  set /a Hour-=12
)

We need a few leading zeroes:

if %Month% LSS 10 set Month=0%Month%
if %Day% LSS 10 set Day=0%Day%
if %Minute% LSS 10 set Minute=0%Minute%
if %Hour% LSS 10 set Hour=0%Hour%

Then it's time to assemble the parts:

set Timestamp=%Month%-%Day%-%Year% %Hour%:%Minute% %ampm%

_{(Just a random note: Why on earth would you want that timestamp format?)}

Answer 2

Unix command line tools are often more powerful than their windows counterparts.

But even with Windows you can use some ported command line tools. For example the free UnxTools package:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/

Here's the download link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/files/unxutils/current/UnxUtils.zip/download

Just take the date.exe from the archive (it's in the subfolder usr\local\wbin) and put it in a folder you also have in your PATH environment.

Then you can call the date.exe with parameters like this:

date.exe +"%m-%d-%y %l:%M %p"

If you want to see all possible formating patterns simply call

date.exe --help

Please take care to include the ".exe" extension. If you leave it off then windows will call the internal date command.

Answer 3

:: construct date and time strings
:: "MM-DD-YYYY HH:MIN AM/PM"
for /f "tokens=1,2" %%u in ('date /t') do set d=%%v 
for /f "tokens=1" %%u in ('time /t') do set t=%%u 
for /f "tokens=2" %%u in ('time /t') do set a=%%u
if "%t:~1,1%"==":" set t=0%t% 
set datestr=%d:~0,2%-%d:~3,2%-%d:~6,4% %t:~0,2%:%t:~3,2% %a%

I use variations of this block of code in nearly every .bat file I write.

Use "%datestr%" to get your date string, i.e.:

echo %datestr%

Answer 4

See Stack Overflow question How to get a UNIVERSAL Windows batch file timestamp for an example of how to get an date time setting that is independent of regional settings. To call the script,

c:\> cscript //nologo myscript.vbs 

Use a for loop to capture the output if needed.