Getting date and time of system startup in Linux

Question

I know that uptime prints the time a machine has been up and running, but is there an easier (reliable) way to get the date of the start up than counting down from this output?

I tried looking around /proc, but didn't find anything of relevance. There's also a line like this on my dmesg:

[    0.673492] rtc_cmos rtc_cmos: setting system clock to 2011-03-14 14:26:52 UTC (1300112812)

But I'm wondering if this method is distribution and kernel version agnostic?

@Bobby: Nothing about the command or its function per se, but as said I want to get the date and time of last system boot, not how long it's been up since. `uptime` returns a string like "up 13 days, 21:01", and you'd need to count it from that. — jho, Mar 28 '11 at 11:29
It's trivial to count back from the uptime value. If you want *reliable*, you want `/proc/uptime`. — sam hocevar, Mar 28 '11 at 14:29

score 49 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '11 at 11:24

49

I found some commands here. Try who -b or last reboot | head -1.
who gives numeric dates, while last reboot returns abbreviated day / month names.

answered Mar 28 '11 at 11:24

charlesbridge

1,249
10
13

how about if we only want the date and nothing else? – T0xicCode May 08 '12 at 03:00
4

`who -b | cut -d' ' -f13` returns date only (-f14 returns time) – charlesbridge May 08 '12 at 11:15
2

Warning: `last reboot` did not give me the correct date ! `who -b` did. – qwertzguy Sep 18 '13 at 18:08
`last reboot` gave me an incorrect date too, wtmp seemed to have been rotated first day of the month – golimar Feb 17 '15 at 15:54

sam hocevar · Answer 2 · 2011-03-28T14:31:50.813

26

This queries the uptime from the kernel and displays it in the local timezone:

date -d "`cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime` seconds ago"

Be careful about other options. The last command will stop working as soon as wtmp has been rotated. The who command depends on the availability and integrity of utmp. And /proc/1 might have the current date instead of the boot time date, and could even be unavailable on a hardened system. Edit: dmesg only has a fixed-length back buffer, so it is unrealiable, too. The kernel logs may be in /var/log but most distributions only keep 8 weeks of them.

edited Mar 28 '11 at 14:31

answered Mar 28 '11 at 12:37

sam hocevar

1,349
11
15

1

Interestingly, this disagrees with `who -b` by a minute or two on my 210-days-uptime system. Looks like `who -b` reports a time stamp, while this counting is somehow affected by clock drifts, even if these are periodically corrected by a running `ntpd`. – Ruslan Aug 27 '14 at 09:11
3

After reviewing all the alternate answers, settled on: **`date -d "\`cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime\` seconds ago" -u`** (which has time/date in UTC) – david6 Jan 14 '16 at 22:32
Phenomenal answer. If the kernel don't know, nobody knows- it's the Source of Truth for the system. The seconds make it easy to perform time calculations (I stumbled on this because I want to know "Which of my hosts didn't reboot within the last day [86,400 seconds]?") – Mike S Jun 03 '18 at 03:13
I have a machine with a faulty RTC (realtime clock), where the clock is only correctly set after boot. `who -b` reports the time with the faulty time. `/proc/uptime` by definition of the calculation will report the actual boot time. – nak Jul 19 '23 at 15:12

score 21 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 01 '14 at 20:52

21

I stumbled on this question while looking for a way to get a consistent, parseable boot time, as opposed to time since boot which changes on every call.

It appears that uptime -s will do the trick on most linux systems.

answered Nov 01 '14 at 20:52

mikegreiling

311
2
4

`uptime -s` outputs e.g. `2017-08-09 01:23:45`. This is best, by being simplest. This command is included in the package "procps". – teika kazura Apr 08 '18 at 12:34
1

The `uptime` in CentOS 6 (`procps version 3.2.8`) does not seem to support this, sadly. – mwfearnley Dec 03 '18 at 10:43
1

`uptime -s` does not always return constant results: https://superuser.com/q/1247713/71144 – cweiske Jan 18 '19 at 09:26
1

Note that this is always in **localtime**, but it does not actually print the timezone/offset. So, if you're looking to pull this from machines programmatically, it's not ideal, as you may need to separately determine their timezone, depending on your use case. So, I'd suggest some of the other answers. – JJC Apr 25 '19 at 00:53

Oddstr13 · Answer 4 · 2016-07-08T22:35:38.177

12

I found the btime line in /proc/stat when poking around a bit

cat /proc/stat | grep btime | awk '{ print $2 }'

and after a quick search, I found this page: /proc/stat explained, which outlines the "Various pieces of information about kernel activity that are available in the /proc/stat file."

The "btime" line gives the time at which the system booted, in seconds since the Unix epoch.

edited Jul 08 '16 at 22:35

answered Aug 30 '11 at 20:30

Oddstr13

331
3
8

1

Seems a lot easier to write `awk '/btime/{print $2}' /proc/stat` – William Pursell Jun 12 '17 at 14:07
@WilliamPursell easiest is always what you already know. I am no awk wizard. :P – Oddstr13 Jun 12 '17 at 19:37
Good point. However, you used cat gratuitously. Just grep from the file. – Mike S Jun 03 '18 at 03:18
@MikeS correct – however, I still stand by my original command chain as a clear representation of where the information is found, even 7 years after my answer. – Oddstr13 Jun 03 '18 at 08:20

teika kazura · Answer 5 · 2018-04-08T12:29:42.893

good: uptime -s, who -b or parsing /proc/uptime
bad: ls -ld /proc/1 and variants.

Don't use ls -ld /proc/1 for this purpose. It's sometimes updated after s2disk or s2ram.

In my case, who -b said:

system boot May 2 09:51

While ls -ld /proc/1:

dr-xr-xr-x 7 root root 0 May 3 13:09 /proc/1

ls -ld for /proc or /sys seem to persist after resuming, but it's implementation dependent, and may change in future, so don't use such methods. And if your system clock is in localtime, not UTC, they have negative offset.

(I don't have the privilege to comment to answers yet, so opened a new answer. Sorry.)

EDIT: uptime -s was first answered in this answer by mikegreiling

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 28 '11 at 11:27

2

The simplest way is to look to see when /sbin/init started (that's always the first process to be started after the kernel loads):

# ls -ld /proc/1
dr-xr-xr-x 7 root root 0 2011-03-27 23:54 /proc/1

So I can see that my machine booted up at 6 minutes to midnight on the 27th of March 2011.

If you want to use it in scripting you can use the stat command instead:

# stat --printf='%Y' /proc/1
1301266491

The %Y specifies the time since the directory was last changed (process creation time) in seconds since the epoch (1/1/70) and is a standard unix timestamp.

answered Mar 28 '11 at 11:27

Majenko

32,128
4
61
81

1

Unfortunately this doesn't work: the mtime on those folders can change for other reasons (I have a system here that has a 5 day uptime and the mtime of /proc/1 is 25 minutes ago) – kdt Dec 18 '12 at 13:10
1

It's **not reliable**, as explained in [my answer](http://superuser.com/a/422747/131062) – teika kazura Feb 13 '15 at 05:46

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Sep 12 '17 at 18:41

1

Under Bash, without pipes nor other processes; just text:

$ REPLY="$(</proc/uptime)"
$ REPLY="${REPLY%%.*}"
$ echo "$REPLY"
31207

(Just reused the REPLY default variable, but you can choose whatever you need)

answered Sep 12 '17 at 18:41

Luchostein

129
4

Sure, Why not? Kinda clever use of variable substringiness. Cool. +1. Thanks for the idea! – Mike S Jun 03 '18 at 03:24

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Apr 25 '19 at 00:43

1

This seems robust and will give it to you in UTC and ISO8601 format. (Remove the last two options to disable either, respectively):

date -d "`cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime` seconds ago" -u -Iseconds

answered Apr 25 '19 at 00:43

JJC

209
2
4

score 1 · Answer 9 · edited May 16 '11 at 18:37

1

In Linux,

ls -ld /proc

seems to give me what I need. The post above is odd. /proc/uptime does not contain a date value – it would have to be subtracted from the current time. Maybe he meant:

date -d @$(( $(date +%s) - $(cut -f1 -d. /proc/uptime) ))

edited May 16 '11 at 18:37

slhck

223,558
70
607
592

answered May 16 '11 at 17:29

gerry

11
1

`uptime -s` provides a date value – mikegreiling Nov 01 '14 at 20:56

LonnieBest · Answer 10 · 2016-05-09T14:07:15.650

0

Command:

(echo ' Currently:' | tr "\n" ' ' ; date +"%Y-%m-%d %k:%M:%S" ; echo '  Up Since:' | tr '\n' ' ' ; uptime -s ; echo '  Duration:' | tr '\n' ' ' ; uptime -p)

Output:

 Currently: 2016-05-09  9:06:29
  Up Since: 2016-05-04 12:56:04
  Duration: up 4 days, 20 hours, 10 minutes

edited May 09 '16 at 14:07

answered May 09 '16 at 13:46

LonnieBest

1,606
8
31
42

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Jul 05 '18 at 15:00

Clear and concise with tuptime command:

# tuptime -t
No.             Startup Date                                          Uptime            Shutdown Date   End                    Downtime

1     09:43:39 AM 08/08/2017      41 days, 0 hours, 51 minutes and 2 seconds   10:34:41 AM 09/18/2017    OK                  10 seconds
2     10:34:51 AM 09/18/2017                         1 minute and 16 seconds   10:36:07 AM 09/18/2017    OK                    1 second
3     10:36:08 AM 09/18/2017                       13 minutes and 20 seconds   10:49:28 AM 09/18/2017    OK                   3 seconds
4     10:49:31 AM 09/18/2017       45 days, 0 hours, 1 minute and 20 seconds   09:50:51 AM 11/02/2017    OK                   4 seconds
5     09:50:55 AM 11/02/2017                       27 minutes and 25 seconds   10:18:20 AM 11/02/2017    OK                   4 seconds
6     10:18:24 AM 11/02/2017                                       9 seconds   10:18:33 AM 11/02/2017    OK                   9 seconds
7     10:18:42 AM 11/02/2017      4 days, 5 hours, 41 minutes and 47 seconds   04:00:29 PM 11/06/2017    OK                  44 seconds
8     04:01:13 PM 11/06/2017    15 days, 17 hours, 33 minutes and 48 seconds   09:35:01 AM 11/22/2017   BAD   10 minutes and 40 seconds
9     09:45:41 AM 11/22/2017               8 hours, 9 minutes and 20 seconds   05:55:01 PM 11/22/2017   BAD     7 minutes and 8 seconds
10    06:02:09 PM 11/22/2017                1 hour, 7 minutes and 54 seconds   07:10:03 PM 11/22/2017   BAD   11 minutes and 30 seconds
11    07:21:33 PM 11/22/2017               1 hour, 58 minutes and 32 seconds   09:20:05 PM 11/22/2017    OK                   5 seconds
12    09:20:10 PM 11/22/2017                       14 minutes and 52 seconds   09:35:02 PM 11/22/2017   BAD    5 minutes and 52 seconds
13    09:40:54 PM 11/22/2017                         4 minutes and 6 seconds   09:45:00 PM 11/22/2017   BAD    4 minutes and 51 seconds
14    09:49:51 PM 11/22/2017             11 hours, 15 minutes and 10 seconds   09:05:01 AM 11/23/2017   BAD    7 minutes and 20 seconds
15    09:12:21 AM 11/23/2017      3 days, 2 hours, 17 minutes and 40 seconds   11:30:01 AM 11/26/2017   BAD   27 minutes and 44 seconds
16    11:57:45 AM 11/26/2017   109 days, 19 hours, 12 minutes and 37 seconds   07:10:22 AM 03/16/2018    OK                  17 seconds
17    07:10:39 AM 03/16/2018     25 days, 3 hours, 55 minutes and 59 seconds   12:06:38 PM 04/10/2018    OK                   3 seconds
18    12:06:41 PM 04/10/2018      8 days, 19 hours, 3 minutes and 20 seconds   07:10:01 AM 04/19/2018   BAD    3 minutes and 52 seconds
19    07:13:53 AM 04/19/2018     77 days, 9 hours, 44 minutes and 39 seconds

It is available on the repository of the mayor Linux distributions. An `apt install tuptime`, `dnf install tuptime`, `apk add tuptime`, `pkg install tuptime`, etc... set up it on the system. — rfmoz, Apr 09 '22 at 15:41

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Dec 04 '14 at 14:06

0

date -d @$(sed -n '/^btime /s///p' /proc/stat)

(yet another way to do this, which is useful in certain circumstances)

answered Dec 04 '14 at 14:06

AmanicA

111
4

Getting date and time of system startup in Linux

12 Answers12

Linked