Digital Clock Settings

[nounoua]

Hi all,

I've had my Pi for four weeks now, but I haven't been able to properly change the settings of the digital clock in the menu bar/panel. I can open the settings window, but then in the text edit lines to change the settings I get some codes which I don't know what stand for. If I use '%A' I get the date, and '%R' gets me the time in 24 hr format. Is there a way to display both the date, and time in 12-hour format?

[mikef]

Notice in the Digital Clock settings dialog it says: Format codes: man 3 strftime |n for line break

Which means you can find the formatting codes with the man utility. Type: man 3 strftime

This will run the man (manual) utility that display the instructions for the strftime command (format date and time). You can use the same formatting characters in the Clock Format and Tooltip Format input boxes to specify how you want the date and/or time to appear. You can use %n to add a line break to format date/time over more than one line.

[swerve151]

@Nounoua

%r will give you a 12 hour clock with am/pm indicator
%R will give you a 24 hour clock
%X will give you a 24 hour clock with seconds
%x will give you the date in this format DD/MM/YY
%d will give you the day in number format
%D will give you the date in this format MM/DD/YY
%a will give you the abbreviated day name
%A will give you the full day name

[aberts10]

i did a 12 hour clock format with this....

%I:%M %p

just set your timezone in raspi with "sudo raspi-config",
then right click the clock and paste it in.

[lgtronik]

My Digital Clock settings are: %d %h %Y / %X

[IndyPi]

For what it's worth: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubun ... ngTheClock

[amnya]

I have set mine to:
%a %d.%h.%Y / %I:%M %p

Which translates to:
Thu 12.May.2016 / 05:41 pm

[chexbox]

On my pi the clock does not count time when the pi is off. It does not fix upon start-up. How do I fix this?

[klricks]

On my pi the clock does not count time when the pi is off. It does not fix upon start-up. How do I fix this?

The time should be set as soon as the Internet connection is established sometime during the boot process or soon after. If you don't have internet connection then you need a RTC module of some sort with a battery backup.

[Rive]

mine is "%r" (and if you hoover the mouse over the time it gives date e.g., "Thursday 05/12/2006")

[chexbox]

On my pi the clock does not count time when the pi is off. It does not fix upon start-up. How do I fix this?

The time should be set as soon as the Internet connection is established sometime during the boot process or soon after. If you don't have internet connection then you need a RTC module of some sort with a battery backup.

It still does not work. The date is wrong too.

[reltek]

On my pi the clock does not count time when the pi is off. It does not fix upon start-up. How do I fix this?

The time should be set as soon as the Internet connection is established sometime during the boot process or soon after. If you don't have internet connection then you need a RTC module of some sort with a battery backup.

It still does not work. The date is wrong too.

Raspberry PI is not like your computer tower keeping time even if you shut it down. PI's date and time comes from Your Internet connection and is set at boot-time. That means when you boot up your PI it should already be connected to a NETWORK with Internet Access.

In the event your PI doesn't have Internet Access when it boots up, its time and date doesn't change but starts where it left off when you shut it down. To overcome this shortcoming you need to something like Real-Time-Clock module that you need to connect to your PI's GPIO pins. Then, you need to have a script or a program that will be called at boot time to read the module time and set it to PI's system clock. This doesn't mean date and time will be accurate - even RTC module drifts, which means you need to also update RTC date and time from your PI's System clock once a day or maybe once a week using CRONTAB. It is really helpful to use wiringPI library, if you are going to be doing this.

[franzsunil]

Date and time information shown on the panel digital clock area uses the linux strftime format for date and time. Please see http://linux.die.net/man/3/strftime for details.

[LDighera]

I'm trying to get the date command to print the date and time formatted like this:

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Wednesday, January 4, 2017 1312 PST

using this command:

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/bin/date --date= '+%_A, %B %-d, %Y %H%M %Z'

however, it fails to provide the current time:

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Wednesday, January 4, 2017 0000 PST

When I ussue the 'date' command without any optional formating, it works correctly:

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Wed  4 Jan 13:15:53 PST 2017

The shell TZ veriable is set:

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echo $TZ PST8PDT

The 'locale' command shows the LC_TIME is set:

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LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"

However, the $LC_TIME shell verable is unset. When I set it as above, it still fails to display the time.

I've read the man page, the info page, and the strftime man page, but am still unable to grasp what I'm doing incorrectly.
Perhaps someone will be good enough to execute this command:

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/bin/date --date= '+%_A, %B %-d, %Y %H%M %Z'

and see if it will print the time on your machine. All clues appreciated.
ADVthanksANCE

[DougieLawson]

Works for me

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pi@viking ~ $ date '+%_A, %B %-d, %Y %H%M %Z'
Wednesday, January 4, 2017 2136 UTC
pi@viking ~ $

[LDighera]

Many thanks, Douglas.

At least now I know it's not a bug in the date command or the format string. But I'm still stumped.
The cause of the issue must be something in my environment.

The only other thing I can think of is that the 'locale' command provides no value for the 'LC_ALL' field. Could that be it? I recall having read something about it needing to be 'LC_ALL=C', but I haven't a clue how to set it.

Thanks again.

[rpdom]

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/bin/date --date= '+%_A, %B %-d, %Y %H%M %Z'

What is that "--date=" doing in there?

With it in I get

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pi@raspberrypi:~ $ /bin/date --date= '+%_A, %B %-d, %Y %H%M %Z'
Wednesday, January 4, 2017 0000 GMT

Without it I get

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pi@raspberrypi:~ $ /bin/date '+%_A, %B %-d, %Y %H%M %Z'
Wednesday, January 4, 2017 2157 GMT

[LDighera]

Thanks for pointing that out, rpdom. It works now.
It's interesting how with the '--date=' it only fails to provide the correct time, and the rest of the output is correct. Interisting.

[ReptileAssassin]

I set mine to %a %h %d %Y , %I:%M %p, and that turns into:
Thu Jan 18 2018 , 07:06 PM