GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams |
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Clock: Date and Time |
20191130 There are two clocks in a computer: the system clock and the hardware clock. The system clock is maintained by the running operating system (e.g., GNU/Linux). It is also said to be maintained by the kernel. The hardware clock is part of the actual hardware of the computer and is usually battery backed up. The current status of the clock can be found from the timedatectl command from systemd:
$ timedatectl status Local time: Sat 2019-11-30 13:02:57 AEDT Universal time: Sat 2019-11-30 02:02:57 UTC RTC time: Sat 2019-11-30 02:02:57 Time zone: Australia/Sydney (AEDT, +1100) System clock synchronized: yes systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes RTC in local TZ: no |
Alternatively, the date command talks to the system clock and the hwclock command talks to the hardware clock.
$ date Sat 30 Nov 12:31:59 AEDT 2019 $ sudo hwclock 2019-11-30 12:32:23.545087+1100 $ sudo hwclock --debug hwclock from util-linux 2.31.1 System Time: 1575077617.821713 Trying to open: /dev/rtc0 Using the rtc interface to the clock. Assuming hardware clock is kept in UTC time. Waiting for clock tick... ...got clock tick Time read from Hardware Clock: 2019/11/30 01:33:38 Hw clock time : 2019/11/30 01:33:38 = 1575077618 seconds since 1969 Time since last adjustment is 1575077618 seconds Calculated Hardware Clock drift is 0.000000 seconds 2019-11-30 12:33:37.795041+1100 |