What is the command to update time and date from internet

Question

What is the command to update time and date from Internet? Is there any application that allows me to do so from its user interface rather than from the shell?

score 260 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 09 '15 at 05:18

260

This is a nice little code I found to update your time in case you have issues with ntp:

sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"

edited Oct 09 '15 at 05:18

kos

41,268

answered Oct 08 '15 at 18:55

Shrukul Habib

2,717

score 199 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 11 '18 at 00:28

199

You can do so with e.g. sudo ntpdate time.nist.gov. Other servers include time.windows.com, etc.

http://www.pool.ntp.org/ lists time servers around the world.

edited Sep 11 '18 at 00:28

B--rian

85

answered Nov 21 '11 at 23:23

Anonymous

11,979

User · Answer 3 · 2021-04-02T02:34:17.530

As of 2018 with a fresh installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, running sudo ntpdate time.nist.gov gives:

sudo: ntpdate: command not found

This is because (official source):

ntpdate is considered deprecated in favour of timedatectl and thereby no more installed by default.

Instead do this to force the sync to happen now:

sudo timedatectl set-ntp off
sudo timedatectl set-ntp on

In my case I was running a Ubuntu on a virtualbox and had saved the machine state so when I started the instance back up again it did not automatically sync the clock since there was no boot event to trigger the sync. So the time was still showing what it was the last time I was running the virtual box.

score 28 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 14 '18 at 18:20

28

Running this command in a terminal should do the trick

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

You can add extra time zones graphically, I think, by clicking on the clock and going through its options.

edited Jul 14 '18 at 18:20

Zanna

72,312

answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:42

Jayo

1,251

score 13 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 07 '14 at 18:19

13

It's very easy to set up from command line: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/NTP.html From that link:

Ubuntu comes with ntpdate as standard, and will run it once at boot time to set up your time according to Ubuntu's NTP server: ntpdate -s ntp.ubuntu.com

Here's GUI example https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime#Time_Synchronization_using_NTP

edited Nov 07 '14 at 18:19

mikewhatever

33,013

answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:42

Daimon

280

score 10 · Answer 6 · answered May 25 '21 at 21:49

I had this issue because I would pause a VM for a while and when I resume, Ubuntu 20.04 would refuse to update any packages until the time was corrected. (i.e. packages were not from the 'future').

The easiest way (by terminal) was to run this command:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd

Tested on Ubuntu's main GNOME edition 20.04.

No need for a separate command to restart NTP. Updates the reported time in GNOME as well.

You can add this to your bash files:

synctime() {
  sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd
}

and run the command after reloading your bash files (or opening a new terminal).

synctime

score 7 · Answer 7 · answered Apr 27 '18 at 05:05

Most here won't work, since ntp will override your settings within seconds.

You need to disable NTP first. On ubuntu it is done as:

    # Disable ntp
    sudo timedatectl set-ntp 0

Then you can do:

    # Set software clock 
    sudo date --set="2018-04-01 22:22:22"
    # Sync with hardware clock 
    sudo hwclock --systohc

score 4 · Answer 8 · answered May 14 '18 at 00:54

dateFromServer=$(curl -v --silent https://google.com/ 2>&1 \
   | grep Date | sed -e 's/< Date: //'); date +"%d%m%Y%H%M%S" -d "$dateFromServer"

or

date -s `curl -I 'https://startpage.com/' 2>/dev/null | grep -i '^date:' | sed 's/^[Dd]ate: //g'`

score 1 · Answer 9 · edited Aug 14 '18 at 06:22

Is there any application that allows me to do so from its user interface rather than from the shell?

I'm using 17.10 and can go to Settings (from the upper-right menu in the UI) > Details > Date & Time. In my case, my system wasn't updating from the Internet even though "Automatic Date & Time" was set to "ON". I simply changed it to "OFF", waited a second, then changed it back to "ON". It picked up the current date and time and I was good to go.

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered May 14 '18 at 21:21

Thanks to Twiglets [For AsusWRT/Merlin Routers]

Here is an alternative that DOES set the date !!! [-s option]. Prints out 'Date' it retrieves & the 'Date' that is set for comparison.

On AsusWRT / Merlin, the only thing that is odd is that the date retrieved is ".... GMT" and the date utility sets the correct time but changes it to "... DST" Environment has TZ set to "GMT"

datetext=$(curl -I 'https://1.1.1.1/' 2>/dev/null | grep "Date:" |sed 's/Date: [A-Z][a-z][a-z], //g'| sed 's/\r//') ; echo "Date Retrieved = $datetext" ; echo -n "Date set = " ; date -s "$datetext" -D'%d %b %Y %T %Z'

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Jul 01 '23 at 11:27

Sometimes when time is out of sync, it is really hard to even go to the internet since it could make DNSSEC validation failures.

This is another way to sync time using ssh

sshpass -p 'password' ssh -t -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no user@hostname "sudo -S <<< 'password' date -s @$(date -u +"%s")"

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered May 18 '25 at 13:41

You can check if automatic time synchronization is enabled by running:

timedatectl status

If you see System clock synchronized: no, it means automatic syncing is off. To enable it, run:

sudo systemctl enable --now chronyd

This will start the chrony service, which keeps your system clock synchronized automatically.

If you want to force an immediate time update, use:

sudo chronyc makestep

This command forces the system clock to be corrected right away.

score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:45

0

You need to install the ntp package. Date/Time settings are availble under system settings. Here's some more information.

answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:45

tohuwawohu

7,502

What is the command to update time and date from internet

13 Answers13

Linked