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Time & Date stamp for batch files

This has been driving me crazy – how to get a decent Time & Date stamp in a batch file. After much Googling and experimenting I came up with this. 

This was tested on XP Pro with English (United States) Regional Settings and will likely not work if your Regional Settings are different. Take a look at the comments from d_m_g_3 below for a Region (United Kingdom) version that does work.

If you’ve tried this and found a way to make it work with your Regional Settings, please leave a comment below with the Region & code you got working to save someone else the headache of figuring it out!

SET TimeStamp=
for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%i in ("%date%") do set datestr=%%l%%j%%k
for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=.: " %%i in ("%time%") do set timestr=%%i%%j%%k%%l
SET TimeStamp=%datestr%%timestr%

It sets the environment variable TimeStamp to the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSSmm.

As soon as I can back track to where I got the bulk of this, I’ll post appropriate credit.

02/19/2012 Update:

I found another approach at Print Date/Time in DOS Batch File that works well for me most of the time, but does have an issue with using a leading space for single digit hours. DOS’s ReName has a problem with that so I’ve settled on just using the DATESTAMP variable – it’s close enough for most of my needs.

Create a date and time stamp in your batch files uses a slightly different approach with SUBSTRING to extract the parts and also explains how to use TRIM to get around the leading space problem.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 by Eric Chromick at 12:03 pm and is filed under batch file, cli, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Time & Date stamp for batch files”

  1. Not on my system (Windows XP ENU)

    TimeStamp=04200915113962

    The current date time is 08 April 2009 15:11

    I think maybe your solution only works for your Regional Settings?

  2. For my region (United Kingdom), the following works

    SET TimeStamp=
    for /f “tokens=1-3 delims=/” %%a in (‘echo %date%’) do SET DATESTR=%%c%%b%%a
    for /f “tokens=1-4 delims=:.” %%a in (‘echo %time%’) do SET TIMESTR=%%a%%b%%c%%d
    SET TimeStamp=%datestr%%timestr%

  3. @d_m_g_3 Thanks for testing & pointing this out! I’m in the US & using English (United States) as my region, but taking a quick glance at a few different formats in the Regional Settings, I can see where my script could easily fail.

    I’ll update the post to point out that it’s based on US regional settings.

    Eric

  4. great – thank you -works for me (USA) and saved me lots of time. linux is so much easier with this kind of stuff

  5. You can use :~ within the date and time variables much easier.

    See http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/2007/02/create-a-date-and-time-stamp-in-your-batch-files/

    It might work with regional settings. As always, test.

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