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Pekka
Asked: 2011-01-27 12:39:27 +0800 CST

Locale-unaware %DATE% and %TIME% in batch files?

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The %DATE% and %TIME% environment variables provide the current date and time on Windows machines on the command line and inside a batch file.

Sadly, those values are locale-aware! Meaning that, say, on a German machine, you will get 

26.1.2011

instead of 

2011-26-01

this screws up sorting if you want to use this variable in a file name.

Is there any easy way to get hold of a locale-unaware YYYY-MM-DD date string in a Windows batch file?

For the moment, I am working with this rather kludgy workaround:

for /f "tokens=1,2,3,4 delims=. " %%i in ('date /t') do set date=%%k-%%j-%%i
echo %date%

but this is now German locale specific - obviously, a completely independent solution would be much nicer.

The OS in question is Server 2008. I would much prefer not using a third party tool, if at all possible.

windows windows-server-2008 batch localization

4 Answers

  1. There were a few attempts (Rob van der Woude had something), but nothing really worked across all locales. However, you can get the current time in a easily-parseable format via

    wmic os get LocalDateTime

    The following gets you at least UTC already:

    @echo off
rem Get the time from WMI - at least that's a format we can work with
set X=
for /f "skip=1 delims=" %%x in ('wmic os get localdatetime') do if not defined X set X=%%x
echo.%X%

rem dissect into parts
set DATE.YEAR=%X:~0,4%
set DATE.MONTH=%X:~4,2%
set DATE.DAY=%X:~6,2%
set DATE.HOUR=%X:~8,2%
set DATE.MINUTE=%X:~10,2%
set DATE.SECOND=%X:~12,2%
set DATE.FRACTIONS=%X:~15,6%
set DATE.OFFSET=%X:~21,4%

echo %DATE.YEAR%-%DATE.MONTH%-%DATE.DAY% %DATE.HOUR%:%DATE.MINUTE%:%DATE.SECOND%.%DATE.FRACTIONS%

    However, you probably need to account for the time zone offset (unless it's for a log file, then I'd always use UTC) but that's nothing a bit of calculation cannot do :-)

    • 25

  2. Here's a two-liner I've been using, which seems to work regardless of Windows version or local time settings:

    FOR /f %%a in ('WMIC OS GET LocalDateTime ^| find "."') DO set DTS=%%a
set CUR_DATE=%DTS:~0,4%-%DTS:~4,2%-%DTS:~6,2%

    This will set a variable called %CUR_DATE% in the following ISO standard format:

    yyyy-mm-dd

    I tried making it a one-liner with &&, but it didn't seem to take, so I resorted to the two-line version. Hope this helps.

    • 14

  3. I use this trick to get UTC..

    for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('tzutil /g') do set CTZ=%%i
tzutil /s UTC
set UTC=
for /f  "skip=1 delims=" %%i in ('WMIC OS GET LocalDateTime') do if not defined UTC set UTC=%%i
tzutil /s "%CTZ%"
set UTC=%UTC:~0,4%-%UTC:~4,2%-%UTC:~6,3%T%UTC:~8,13%
echo %UTC%

    However it does have the side effect of briefly changing the entire system to UTC. This is probably OK on a personal workstation, but not sure what the impact would be a large production server, which should probably be set to UTC anyway.

    • 0

  4. Here is my solution to this problem:

    @echo off

set curtime=
for /f "tokens=*" %%x in ('powershell -NoLogo -NonInteractive -OutputFormat Text -Command "[DateTime]::Now.ToString(\"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss\")"') do set curtime=%%x
echo %curtime%

    Of course, the same as UTC time:

    set curtime=
for /f "tokens=*" %%x in ('powershell -NoLogo -NonInteractive -OutputFormat Text -Command "[DateTime]::UtcNow.ToString(\"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ssK\")"') do set curtime=%%x
echo %curtime%

    You may play with formatting as much as you like, the output is stable independent from Windows of CurrentLocale (here is minimal knowledge of Powershell and .Net required).

    • 0