GNU shell utilities - Examples of date

Here are a few examples. Also see the documentation for the `-d' option in the previous section.

To print the date of the day before yesterday:
```
date --date='2 days ago'
```
To print the date of the day three months and one day hence:
```
date --date='3 months 1 day'
```
To print the day of year of Christmas in the current year:
```
date --date='25 Dec' +%j
```
To print the current full month name and the day of the month:
```
date '+%B %d'
```
But this may not be what you want because for the first nine days of the month, the `%d' expands to a zero-padded two-digit field, for example `date -d 1may '+%B %d'' will print `May 01'.
To print a date without the leading zero for one-digit days of the month, you can use the (GNU extension) - modifier to suppress the padding altogether.
```
date -d=1may '+%B %-d'
```
To print the current date and time in the format required by many non-GNU versions of date when setting the system clock:
```
date +%m%d%H%M%Y.%S
```
To set the system clock forward by two minutes:
```
date --set='+2 minutes'
```
To print the date in the format specified by RFC-822, use `date --rfc'. I just did and saw this:
```
Mon, 25 Mar 1996 23:34:17 -0600
```