What is the command to update time and date from internet

Question

What is the command to update time and date from Internet? Is there any application that allows me to do so from its user interface rather than from the shell?

Do you need extremely accurate time? (If so, you need to familiarize yourself with ntpq and choose time servers). If you just want your time to be (approx.) correct, then try: System Settings >> Time & Date, and check that 'Set the time' is set to 'Automatically from the Internet'. — david6, Nov 21 '11 at 23:26
If you want constantly extremely accurate, install ntpd. This is a small process that runs in the background and adjusts time constantly instead of bursts/jumps, but it will take up a bit of your resources. — strugee, May 24 '13 at 04:08
Worth noting that this changed as of 2018, and the top answers are no longer correct for recent versions of Ubuntu. You will likely need this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/998449/53783 — Niels Abildgaard, May 15 '18 at 11:38
This question is of critical importance nowadays. Lately it's become very tricky : some PCs use chrony or ntpd, they always find a reason NOT to update the time (clock is too wrong, win dual-boot-related issues, ntp may also refuse to trust clock sources that don't have internet). Moreover, if you have a PC with internet, but a wrong clock, as now browsers and websites force you to use HTTPS, it will block as your clock is wrong, and you can't even google how to fix it! It would be nice if there was an answer that addresses all cases. "Set the clock by hand" is the most reliable one now... — bct, Apr 23 '19 at 05:55
Does this answer your question? How to force a clock update using ntp? — T.Todua, Jun 17 '21 at 19:05

score 260 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 09 '15 at 05:18

260

This is a nice little code I found to update your time in case you have issues with ntp:

sudo date -s "$(wget -qSO- --max-redirect=0 google.com 2>&1 | grep Date: | cut -d' ' -f5-8)Z"

edited Oct 09 '15 at 05:18

kos

41,378

answered Oct 08 '15 at 18:55

Shrukul Habib

2,717

2

Nice solution ! – Farid Rn Aug 24 '16 at 10:55
Very Nice, worked for me. – Janderson Silva Jan 06 '17 at 19:40
12

This should be the accepted answer! – brijs Jan 31 '17 at 18:23
This snippet made its way to my arsenal ! ;) – Dave Amit Jun 25 '17 at 16:11
Crazy, but it works! – wordsforthewise Aug 09 '17 at 14:11
for me too this is the solution – desmond13 Aug 10 '17 at 07:37
2

Works, but I have one problem. The command sets the clock to GMT, not the local time. Any workaround for this? – samarth-kashyap Mar 23 '18 at 05:46
3

This is good, but it usually will be between 8 and 50 ms behind since it doesn't synchronize per se. – Nonny Moose Jul 14 '18 at 14:54
1

@gksamarth this command did set the correct timezone for me (I'm currently GMT+2) – Arnaud P Sep 11 '19 at 10:33
It works for me, anyone knows an equivalent command without sudo? I would like to put it in the .bashrc file to be executed at every terminal I open – desmond13 Mar 24 '20 at 14:12
I like this answer because it is similar to one I had to employ on a STB which had WebKit but not NTP! And we actually used XMLHttpRequest instead of wget. And we had to build a JS extension into the WebKit port so that it could set the time from the time we parsed from the HTTP header. It had to be kinda accurate and that's what we got. I tried the wget version just now but the wget I have is not configured for https so it didn't work. – cardiff space man Mar 30 '20 at 19:33
2

the solution works, but don't expect accuracy compared to NTP. this approach simple does an HTTP request to google.com and syncs local date. NTP is quite more than that: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5905 – logoff Aug 18 '21 at 10:03

score 201 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 11 '18 at 00:28

201

You can do so with e.g. sudo ntpdate time.nist.gov. Other servers include time.windows.com, etc.

http://www.pool.ntp.org/ lists time servers around the world.

edited Sep 11 '18 at 00:28

B--rian

85

answered Nov 21 '11 at 23:23

Anonymous

12,009

6

I'm getting an error the NTP socket is in use, exiting – friederbluemle Aug 11 '14 at 02:29
7

@friederbluemle As said in this answer, you have to stop ntp service sudo service ntp stop. Then you can use the command suggested in the answer and finally you can restart the service with sudo service ntp start – Michele Sep 07 '14 at 14:35
This works, but it doesn't update the clock in the taskbar automatically. – posfan12 Jul 12 '16 at 23:36
6

I get a "ntpdate[15806]: no server suitable for synchronization found" error. The second answer below using the google.com works better – Kim Stacks May 04 '17 at 12:10
8

ntpdate: command not found – rogerdpack May 17 '18 at 21:08
6

if you want to use nptdate, and it's not found, then: sudo apt install ntpdate; note that it's not installed by default anymore, and may no longer be the preferred solution with latest versions of ubuntu; see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime and see also https://askubuntu.com/questions/254826/how-to-force-a-clock-update-using-ntp for more options (as well as other answers to this question) – michael Sep 13 '18 at 19:30
6 Nov 19:55:16 ntpdate[8504]: no server suitable for synchronization found – chovy Nov 07 '19 at 17:06
Answer is out of date as of 2 years ago. – dessalines Jul 12 '21 at 18:13
This answer works with Ubuntu 20.04 under WSL. – SO_fix_the_vote_sorting_bug Aug 26 '21 at 20:57
ntpdig: no eligible servers – rafaelcastrocouto May 27 '25 at 16:38

User · Answer 3 · 2021-04-02T02:34:17.530

124

As of 2018 with a fresh installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, running sudo ntpdate time.nist.gov gives:

sudo: ntpdate: command not found

This is because (official source):

ntpdate is considered deprecated in favour of timedatectl and thereby no more installed by default.

Instead do this to force the sync to happen now:

sudo timedatectl set-ntp off
sudo timedatectl set-ntp on

In my case I was running a Ubuntu on a virtualbox and had saved the machine state so when I started the instance back up again it did not automatically sync the clock since there was no boot event to trigger the sync. So the time was still showing what it was the last time I was running the virtual box.

edited Apr 02 '21 at 02:34

answered Jan 21 '18 at 22:28

User

1,513

1

I just upgraded to bionic and noticed that ntpdate wasn't working anymore, and timedatectl worked for me. – kapad Jul 06 '18 at 08:39
4

It worked for me too, on Ubuntu 18.04. – avpaderno Jul 14 '18 at 11:43
1

If the time doesn't change, check your timezone with just timedatectl. If it's wrong, see the --help section for the command on how to change it. – Brad Turek Aug 22 '18 at 16:28
5

Nice catch for the Virtual Box. Saved a lot of debugging headache! – Mohd Abdul Mujib Nov 11 '18 at 23:57
1

I got this error: Failed to set ntp: NTP not supported on Ubuntu 20.04. – Ryan Dec 31 '21 at 22:22
I didn't even need sudo! BTW, you can chain them: timedatectl set-ntp off && timedatectl set-ntp on. And in my case, my machine isn't updating when waking from hibernate. – wjandrea Jan 23 '25 at 18:25

score 28 · Answer 4 · edited Jul 14 '18 at 18:20

28

Running this command in a terminal should do the trick

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

You can add extra time zones graphically, I think, by clicking on the clock and going through its options.

edited Jul 14 '18 at 18:20

Zanna

72,471

answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:42

Jayo

1,251

Timezones are not really the same as (accurate) time. But, it also not very clear what Vikramjeet was asking either. – david6 Nov 21 '11 at 22:05
What is the command to update time and date from Internet is the question, sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata is the answer, so what gives? the comment about the timezones, is related to the only thing i know to be possible graphically – Jayo Nov 21 '11 at 22:24
I assumed that by graphically they meant a graphical (or 'GUI') method, and NOT geographic (or worldwide). – david6 Nov 21 '11 at 22:55
so did i, i am not aware of a way to update the date and time via the net graphically, so i use the terminal, what i do know how to do graphically is set up time zones, the part about time zones was my two cents on what can be done to affect the time in a graphical manner, as far as i knew, am i understood now? – Jayo Nov 21 '11 at 23:19
this works for me since it does update the time – ch271828n Oct 01 '21 at 00:39
1

This update timezone but not the date of the system – Loenix Jun 15 '22 at 09:44

score 13 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 07 '14 at 18:19

13

It's very easy to set up from command line: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/NTP.html From that link:

Ubuntu comes with ntpdate as standard, and will run it once at boot time to set up your time according to Ubuntu's NTP server: ntpdate -s ntp.ubuntu.com

Here's GUI example https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime#Time_Synchronization_using_NTP

edited Nov 07 '14 at 18:19

mikewhatever

33,073

answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:42

Daimon

280

6

Please do not use links to other sites. When they disappear so does the information you posted. Prevent 'link rot' from happening by answering with the content of the link (and give credit where credit is due). – Rinzwind Nov 21 '11 at 13:46

score 11 · Answer 6 · answered May 25 '21 at 21:49

I had this issue because I would pause a VM for a while and when I resume, Ubuntu 20.04 would refuse to update any packages until the time was corrected. (i.e. packages were not from the 'future').

The easiest way (by terminal) was to run this command:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd

Tested on Ubuntu's main GNOME edition 20.04.

No need for a separate command to restart NTP. Updates the reported time in GNOME as well.

You can add this to your bash files:

synctime() {
  sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd
}

and run the command after reloading your bash files (or opening a new terminal).

synctime

score 7 · Answer 7 · answered Apr 27 '18 at 05:05

Most here won't work, since ntp will override your settings within seconds.

You need to disable NTP first. On ubuntu it is done as:

    # Disable ntp
    sudo timedatectl set-ntp 0

Then you can do:

    # Set software clock 
    sudo date --set="2018-04-01 22:22:22"
    # Sync with hardware clock 
    sudo hwclock --systohc

score 4 · Answer 8 · answered May 14 '18 at 00:54

4

dateFromServer=$(curl -v --silent https://google.com/ 2>&1 \
   | grep Date | sed -e 's/< Date: //'); date +"%d%m%Y%H%M%S" -d "$dateFromServer"

or

date -s `curl -I 'https://startpage.com/' 2>/dev/null | grep -i '^date:' | sed 's/^[Dd]ate: //g'`

answered May 14 '18 at 00:54

Tyler

213

1

The standard way of setting the date and time by connecting with time servers via ntp. Why are you using https connections to do this? – xiota May 14 '18 at 01:23
1

// , Sometimes it's nice to have an alternative to the standard way, I guess. – Nathan Basanese Jan 16 '19 at 03:25
4

My ISP was blocking my NTP server – Tyler Feb 04 '19 at 05:06

score 1 · Answer 9 · edited Aug 14 '18 at 06:22

Is there any application that allows me to do so from its user interface rather than from the shell?

I'm using 17.10 and can go to Settings (from the upper-right menu in the UI) > Details > Date & Time. In my case, my system wasn't updating from the Internet even though "Automatic Date & Time" was set to "ON". I simply changed it to "OFF", waited a second, then changed it back to "ON". It picked up the current date and time and I was good to go.

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered May 14 '18 at 21:21

Thanks to Twiglets [For AsusWRT/Merlin Routers]

Here is an alternative that DOES set the date !!! [-s option]. Prints out 'Date' it retrieves & the 'Date' that is set for comparison.

On AsusWRT / Merlin, the only thing that is odd is that the date retrieved is ".... GMT" and the date utility sets the correct time but changes it to "... DST" Environment has TZ set to "GMT"

datetext=$(curl -I 'https://1.1.1.1/' 2>/dev/null | grep "Date:" |sed 's/Date: [A-Z][a-z][a-z], //g'| sed 's/\r//') ; echo "Date Retrieved = $datetext" ; echo -n "Date set = " ; date -s "$datetext" -D'%d %b %Y %T %Z'

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Jul 01 '23 at 11:27

Sometimes when time is out of sync, it is really hard to even go to the internet since it could make DNSSEC validation failures.

This is another way to sync time using ssh

sshpass -p 'password' ssh -t -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no user@hostname "sudo -S <<< 'password' date -s @$(date -u +"%s")"

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered May 18 '25 at 13:41

You can check if automatic time synchronization is enabled by running:

timedatectl status

If you see System clock synchronized: no, it means automatic syncing is off. To enable it, run:

sudo systemctl enable --now chronyd

This will start the chrony service, which keeps your system clock synchronized automatically.

If you want to force an immediate time update, use:

sudo chronyc makestep

This command forces the system clock to be corrected right away.

score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:45

0

You need to install the ntp package. Date/Time settings are availble under system settings. Here's some more information.

answered Nov 21 '11 at 13:45

tohuwawohu

7,522

4

The link is dead... As said by Rinzwind "Please do not use links to other sites. When they disappear so does the information you posted. Prevent 'link rot' from happening by answering with the content of the link (and give credit where credit is due)." Thanks – Michele Sep 07 '14 at 14:30

What is the command to update time and date from internet

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