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UnKNOWn
Asked: 2021-06-15 07:10:44 +0800 CST

How to manipulate date keeping the same time via command line

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I am in a need of manipulating the system time for few minutes.

Say I need to keep the time as it is and change the date to next date.
After few minutes.. I need to go back to the normal time with out giving any manual inputs.

How is this possible with command line only.

I have gone through this What is the command line statement for changing the System clock? and it requires to input date+time.

I dont want to change the time, only the date. Once the requirement is done that is after few minutes, I dont want to enter any manual inputs for date and time..

I want to go back to regular time with command line.

date

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is an example of what ( I think ) you want. It will change the year only to last year for 4 minutes then back to current date again. Your machine needs to be connected to the Internet for this to work:

    sudo bash -c "timedatectl set-ntp off && date -s 'last year' && sleep 4m && timedatectl set-ntp on"
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  2. For the below to work, you should first go to Settings → Date & Time and disable Automatic Date & Time.

    You can then use the following command as a (long) one-liner:

    sudo date --set="2010-05-02 $(date '+%T')" && sleep 10 && sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"

    The above command:

    • Gets the current system time:

      date '+%T'

      and sets the date to the one you wish, keeping the current time:

      sudo date --set="2010-05-02 $(date '+%T')"

      In this example the date, which you may change to what you need, is 2010-05-02.

    • Keeps the altered date for the specified time interval using the sleep command. Here I have used sleep 10 to keep the altered time for 10 seconds. You can add an m, h, or d suffix to sleep's argument (here 10) to specify the time in minutes, hours, or days, respectively.

    • Reverts the time to the current time (requires internet access):

      sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"

      Credits to Shrukul Habib.

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