Date Time operations with PowerShell

In this article, I’ll go through various date time operations you can perform using PowerShell.

Get-Date

You can use Get-Date cmdlet to get today’s date.

Below commands can be used to display only Date or Time.

Get-Date -DisplayHint Time

Get-Date -DisplayHint Date

You can also specify format to display date and time. You can use –Format parameter with Get-Date and specify ‘G’ format specifier to get General short date and short time.

Get-Date -Format G

You can use –UFormat parameter to specify custom format of date time.

Get-Date -UFormat "%d, %B, %Y, %A %r %t"

You can use foreach with get-date to get format as per your need.

Get-Date -Format F

Get-Date -Format F | foreach {$_ -replace ":", "-"}

You can find for all the properties of DateTime using Get-Member cmdlets.

Get-Date | Get-Member -MemberType Properties

You can get date time values as per your need using properties and methods of Date Time object.

Get-Date).TimeOfDay

Below are some output of Get-Date properties and methods can be used as per your requirements.

Properties/Methods	Output
(Get-Date).Date	02 March 2018 00:00:00
(Get-Date).Day	2
(Get-Date).DayOfWeek	Friday
(Get-Date).DayOfYear	61
(Get-Date).Hour	18
(Get-Date).Minute	48
(Get-Date).Month	3
(Get-Date).Second	5
(Get-Date).Millisecond	227
(Get-Date).IsDaylightSavingTime()	False
(Get-Date).ToShortDateString()	02-03-2018
(Get-Date).ToShortTimeString()	06:54 PM
(Get-Date).ToUniversalTime()	02 March 2018 13:26:17

You can add or remove date or time to current display date time using below various methods.

Methods	Output
(Get-Date).AddDays(10)	12 March 2018 19:01:09
(Get-Date).AddDays(-10)	20 February 2018 19:01:52
(Get-Date).AddYears(2)	02 March 2020 19:07:18
(Get-Date).AddMonths(3)	02 June 2018 19:04:48
(Get-Date).AddHours(3)	02 March 2018 22:03:48
(Get-Date).AddMinutes(23)	02 March 2018 19:28:54
(Get-Date).AddSeconds(40)	02 March 2018 19:06:58

You can find difference between two dates using below command.

(Get-Date).DayOfYear - (Get-Date -year 2018 -month 11 -date 20).DayOfYear

You can also create New-TimeSpan object to represent date at some interval of days or time. You can also check date time of that timespan.

(Get-Date) - (New-TimeSpan -Days 20)

(Get-Date) - (New-TimeSpan -Days -20)

Set-Date

You can change system date and time using Set-Date cmdlet. You can specify new date and time to Set-Date and it will change your system date and time. You need administrator privileges to execute Set-Date command.

Set-Date -Date (Get-Date).AddDays(5)

Set-Date -Date (Get-Date).AddDays(-5)

I hope you have now some knowledge about some basic date and time operations that you can perform in PowerShell. Thank you for reading this article. Please leave your feedback in comments below.

Reference –

MSDN

See Also –

Introduction to Windows PowerShell

Working with File and Folders using PowerShell

Advanced Files and Folders techniques with PowerShell

Working with Processes using PowerShell