Question

Update: Now that it’s 2016 I’d use PowerShell for this unless there’s a really compelling backwards-compatible reason for it, particularly because of the regional settings issue with using date. See @npocmaka’s https://stackoverflow.com/a/19799236/8479

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What’s a Windows command line statement(s) I can use to get the current datetime in a format that I can put into a filename?

I want to have a .bat file that zips up a directory into an archive with the current date and time as part of the name, for example, Code_2008-10-14_2257.zip. Is there any easy way I can do this, independent of the regional settings of the machine?

I don’t really mind about the date format, ideally it’d be yyyy-mm-dd, but anything simple is fine.

So far I’ve got this, which on my machine gives me Tue_10_14_2008_230050_91:

rem Get the datetime in a format that can go in a filename. set _my_datetime=%date%_%time% set _my_datetime=%_my_datetime: =_% set _my_datetime=%_my_datetime::=% set _my_datetime=%_my_datetime:/=_% set _my_datetime=%_my_datetime:.=_%  rem Now use the timestamp by in a new ZIP file name. 'd:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe' a -r Code_%_my_datetime%.zip Code 

I can live with this, but it seems a bit clunky. Ideally it’d be briefer and have the format mentioned earlier.

I’m using Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional. I don’t want to install additional utilities to achieve this (although I realise there are some that will do nice date formatting).

Answer 1

See Windows Batch File (.bat) to get current date in MMDDYYYY format:

@echo off For /f 'tokens=2-4 delims=/ ' %%a in ('date /t') do (set mydate=%%c-%%a-%%b) For /f 'tokens=1-2 delims=/:' %%a in ('time /t') do (set mytime=%%a%%b) echo %mydate%_%mytime% 

If you prefer the time in 24 hour/military format, you can replace the second FOR line with this:

For /f 'tokens=1-2 delims=/:' %%a in ('%TIME%') do (set mytime=%%a%%b) 

C:> .\date.bat
2008-10-14_0642

If you want the date independently of the region day/month order, you can use ‘WMIC os GET LocalDateTime’ as a source, since it’s in ISO order:

@echo off for /F 'usebackq tokens=1,2 delims==' %%i in (`wmic os get LocalDateTime /VALUE 2^>NUL`) do if '.%%i.'=='.LocalDateTime.' set ldt=%%j set ldt=%ldt:~0,4%-%ldt:~4,2%-%ldt:~6,2% %ldt:~8,2%:%ldt:~10,2%:%ldt:~12,6% echo Local date is [%ldt%] 

C:>test.cmd
Local date is [2012-06-19 10:23:47.048]