How do I get the day month and year from a Windows cmd.exe script?

Question

How do I get the current day month and year from inside a Windows cmd script? I need to get each value into a separate variable.

Answer 1

The only reliably way I know is to use VBScript to do the heavy work for you. There is no portable way of getting the current date in a usable format with a batch file alone. The following VBScript file

Wscript.Echo("set Year=" & DatePart("yyyy", Date))
Wscript.Echo("set Month=" & DatePart("m", Date))
Wscript.Echo("set Day=" & DatePart("d", Date))

and this batch snippet

for /f "delims=" %%x in ('cscript /nologo date.vbs') do %%x
echo %Year%-%Month%-%Day%

should work, though.

While you can get the current date in a batch file with either date /t or the %date% pseudo-variable, both follow the current locale in what they display. Which means you get the date in potentially any format and you have no way of parsing that.

Answer 2

To get the year, month, and day you can use the %date% environment variable and the :~ operator. %date% expands to something like Thu 08/12/2010 and :~ allows you to pick up specific characters out of a variable:

set year=%date:~10,4%
set month=%date:~4,2%
set day=%date:~7,2%
set filename=%year%_%month%_%day%

Use %time% in similar fashion to get what you need from the current time.

set /? will give you more information on using special operators with variables.

Answer 3

A variant of script that works local-independently. Put it in a text file with .cmd extension and run.

::: Begin set date

for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/-. " %%i in ('date /t') do (call :set_date %%i %%j %%k %%l)
goto :end_set_date

:set_date
if "%1:~0,1%" gtr "9" shift
for /f "skip=1 tokens=2-4 delims=(-)" %%m in ('echo,^|date') do (set %%m=%1&set %%n=%2&set %%o=%3)
goto :eof

:end_set_date
::: End set date

echo day in 'DD' format is %dd%; month in 'MM' format is %mm%; year in 'YYYY' format is %yy%

The variables %dd%, %mm% and %yy% will keep the day('DD' format), the month('MM' format) and the year('YYYY' format) respectively.