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21.1.3 Setting the time ¶

You must have appropriate privileges to set the system clock. For changes to persist across a reboot, the hardware clock may need to be updated from the system clock, which might not happen automatically on your system.

To set the clock, you can use the --set (-s) option (see Options for date) or a operand of the form ‘mmddhhmm[[cc]yy][.ss]’ where each two-letter component stands for two digits with the following meanings:

mm

month (this is the first mm)

dd

day within month

hh

hour

mm

minute (this is the second mm)

cc

first two digits of year (optional)

yy

last two digits of year (optional)

ss

second (optional; this is a GNU extension)

The --date and --set options may not be used with an argument in the above format. The --universal option may be used with such an argument to indicate that the specified date and time are relative to Universal Time rather than to the local time zone.