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According to many websites I found online the touch commands' -t argument accepts the time stamp in the following format:

[[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] Here, CC: The first two digits of the year. YY: The last two digits of the year. MM: Month DD: Day of the month hh: Hour mm: Minute ss: Seconds

For example:

$ touch -t 199901011200 test.txt

Can I use the date or stat command to obtain the timestamp in the same format from a file or directory? By same format I mean the format above [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] By default the date command has a different output.

Note: I do not want to use touch reference -r command.

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Using date you specify the following format:

date -r test.txt +'%Y%m%d%H%M.%S'
  1. %Y: Year (with four digits)
  2. %m: Month number (with two digits)
  3. %d: Day (with two digits)
  4. %H: Hour (from 00 to 23)
  5. %M: Minutes
  6. %S: Seconds

You can check man date to more information.

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  • Thank you. I think the ss in [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] is different from what the date command's %S outputs because I get this error when I pipe the date ouput into touch: touch: invalid date format ‘20220901123513’. I'm wondering if touch uses the seconds since the epoch which is %s in date. That works. I'm just not sure what they mean in [.ss] Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 8:37
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    @ZoltanKing I've updated the answer. With touch you should add a . before the seconds. Commented Oct 17, 2022 at 8:44

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