need linux equivalent to windows "echo %date% %time% %COMPUTERNAME%"

Question

In Linux,

"echo %date% %time% %COMPUTERNAME%"

returns

%date% %time% %COMPUTERNAME%

not

Fri 09/24/2010 10:46:25.42 WXP2010043001

as Windows does. I need to be able to do this for the logs I'm setting up.

Answer 1

You can do:

dt=$(date)
echo $dt $HOSTNAME

Answer 2

Use the date command with a format like this:

date +"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S $HOSTNAME"

To get hundreds of seconds, you may need to do some text processing like this:

DATE=date +'%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S.%N'
DATE=${DATE%???????}
DATE="$DATE $HOSTNAME"

This is because date offers seconds, nanoseconds, and nothing in between!

Answer 3

As a complement: percentage character is not used to reference variables on any Linux shell. You should use the dollar sign for this.

You should probably read an introduction to Bash (here)

Answer 4

In Linux, there is the date command. If you don't like the default format, it can be modified. See the manpage of date

For hostname, you can use hostname command, or $HOSTNAME environment variable, if it is set.

With system name, it is more complicated. You can use uname -a, sometimes it contains the OS name. Some distributions also have lsb-release, but not all of them.

Answer 5

Several people have provided answers based on date, but your question requires the short day name (although my UK Win 7 installation doesn't provide this with the ECHO command you specified), which no one has (so far) addressed.

To get this, you will probably want to include %a in the format string:

date "+%a %m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S $HOSTNAME"