Question

A simple syntactical question may be

While trying to display the date in my custom format, i am using

date '+DATE %m-%y%nTIME %H:%M:%S'

What is the purpose of ‘+’ symbol before specifying Date format ?

Answer 1

The + tells date that you want it to be in that format. From the man page:

SYNOPSIS
   date [OPTION]... [+FORMAT]
   date [-u|--utc|--universal] [MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]

Otherwise, date thinks you are trying to send it a date string ([MMDDhhmm[[CC]YY][.ss]]), not a format string.