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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T09:26:27+00:00

I’d like to know if it’s possible to simply retrieve a Unix timestamp from

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I’d like to know if it’s possible to simply retrieve a Unix timestamp from an external server (using NTP, I suppose). I know there’s ntpd, which will update the current system time to the time given by an NTP server, but I only want to read the timestamp. Is it possible using a Bash command in Linux? If not, I guess I’ll just have to write a Python (or something) app to get it and print it on the shell.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Some servers provide the daytime daemon which can give you what you want, in textual form anyway.

    Try:

    telnet SERVER daytime

    on your favorite SERVER.

    Example transcript:

    pax$ telnet time.nist.gov daytime
Trying 192.43.244.18...
Connected to time.nist.gov.
Escape character is '^]'.

55860 11-10-26 06:33:38 12 0 0 438.2 UTC(NIST) *
Connection closed by foreign host.
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