Windows – Locale-unaware %DATE% and %TIME% in batch files

batchlocalizationwindowswindows-server-2008

The %DATE% and %TIME% environment variables provide the current date and time on Windows machines on the command line and inside a batch file.

Sadly, those values are locale-aware! Meaning that, say, on a German machine, you will get 

26.1.2011

instead of 

2011-26-01

this screws up sorting if you want to use this variable in a file name.

Is there any easy way to get hold of a locale-unaware YYYY-MM-DD date string in a Windows batch file?

For the moment, I am working with this rather kludgy workaround:

for /f "tokens=1,2,3,4 delims=. " %%i in ('date /t') do set date=%%k-%%j-%%i
echo %date%

but this is now German locale specific – obviously, a completely independent solution would be much nicer.

The OS in question is Server 2008. I would much prefer not using a third party tool, if at all possible.

Best Answer

There were a few attempts (Rob van der Woude had something), but nothing really worked across all locales. However, you can get the current time in a easily-parseable format via

wmic os get LocalDateTime

The following gets you at least UTC already:

@echo off
rem Get the time from WMI - at least that's a format we can work with
set X=
for /f "skip=1 delims=" %%x in ('wmic os get localdatetime') do if not defined X set X=%%x
echo.%X%

rem dissect into parts
set DATE.YEAR=%X:~0,4%
set DATE.MONTH=%X:~4,2%
set DATE.DAY=%X:~6,2%
set DATE.HOUR=%X:~8,2%
set DATE.MINUTE=%X:~10,2%
set DATE.SECOND=%X:~12,2%
set DATE.FRACTIONS=%X:~15,6%
set DATE.OFFSET=%X:~21,4%

echo %DATE.YEAR%-%DATE.MONTH%-%DATE.DAY% %DATE.HOUR%:%DATE.MINUTE%:%DATE.SECOND%.%DATE.FRACTIONS%

However, you probably need to account for the time zone offset (unless it's for a log file, then I'd always use UTC) but that's nothing a bit of calculation cannot do :-)

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