3 Advanced usages of Linux ‘date’ command

In Linux shell, ‘date’ is a basic command to show current date, like:

$ date Sat Jan  8 15:34:16 CST 2011 $

From the result, it shows more than just date, and also time and time zone. It’s different from what DOS does, which use two command to get/set date and time. However the ‘date’ command can do much more than this, let’s first check the usage.
Standard version:

$ date --help Usage: date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]   or:  date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]] Display the current time in the given FORMAT, or set the system date. ...[skipped]