The date command with any options or flags will return something like this.

The following is the absoulte minimal code needed to produce the date in a BASH script.

~]# date
Wed Nov 30 19:01:23 CST 2023

Here is how you could add some text before the date in a bash shell script.

#!/bin/bash
echo "The current date and time is $(date)"

Which should produce the following.

The current date and time is Wed Nov 30 19:01:23 CST 2016

The -d or --date option can be used to set a specific date.

~]$ date --date "2023-01-01"
Sun Jan  1 00:00:00 CST 2023

Or to update the date, going forward or backwards x days.

#!/bin/bash
forward_14_days=$(date '+%m-%d-%Y' --date '+14 days')
backwards_14_days=$(date '+%m-%d-%Y' --date '-14 days')

Or months.

#!/bin/bash
forward_six_year=$(date '+%m-%d-%Y' --date '+6 months')
backward_six_year=$(date '+%m-%d-%Y' --date '-6 months')

Or years.

#!/bin/bash
forward_one_year=$(date '+%m-%d-%Y' --date '+1 year')
backward_one_year=$(date '+%m-%d-%Y' --date '-1 year')

Here is an example of how you could format the date.

#!/bin/bash
echo "The current date is $(date '+%m-%d-%Y')"

Which should produce the following.

The current date and time is 11-30-2016

Or like this.

#!/bin/bash
echo "The current date is $(date +%F)"

Following are commonly used format options.

UTC timezone

The date command will return the date for the timezone of your Linux system. The -u or --utc or --universal flag can be used to return the date in the UTC timezone.

date --utc

Or like this.

utc_time=$(TZ=GMT date)
echo $utc_time

Or like this.

export TZ=GMT
utc_time=$(date)
echo $utc_time

Variable and if / else statement

We can put the date in a variable and then use an if / else statement to display certain text based on the statement.

#!/bin/bash
today_epoch=$(date +%s)
some_other_date_epoch=$(date --date "2022-07-03" +%s)

if [ $today_epoch -le $some_other_date_epoch ]; then
  echo True
else
  echo False
fi

Running this script will produce the following:

False