Just the other day, the following message appeared on my FreeBSD 10 virtual machine when first booted up:
root@bsd:~ # sMay 5 07:47:24 bsd ntpd[743]: time correction of 18001 seconds exceeds sanity limit (1000); set clock manually to the correct UTC time.
To display the current time and date, type the date command:
$ Date
The output of the date command is:
Mon May 5 07:47:53 CDT 2014
To set the time and date, the user must be superuser or root and the following format utilized:
date ccyymmddHHMM.ss
Referencing the date man page,
- cc – Century (either 10 or 20) prepended to the abbreviated year.
- yy – Year in abbreviated form (e.g., 14 for 2014)
- mm – Numeric month from 1 to 12
- dd – Day, from 1 to 31
- HH – Hour, from 0 to 23
- MM – Minutes, from 0 to 59
- ss – Seconds, from 0 to 61 (59 plus a maximum to two leap seconds)
Example:
To change the date to May 5, 2014 10:05:33, type the following command at the prompt:
$ date 201405051005.33
To change the time zone, type the tzsetup command:
$ tzsetup
As always, please consult the man pages for date and tzsetup for additional information and configuration settings at www.freebsd.org.