How to compute date for touch -t

Question

How to create date type in bash?

what this date mean? '1803141400'

touch -t 1803141400 test1 test2

How can I compute time?

Solution

According to touch man page:

  -t STAMP
              use [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] instead of current time

where:

CC: First two digit of the year
YY: Last two digits of the year
MM: Month (two-digit numeric month)
DD: Day (two-digit numeric day i.e. day of month)
hh: Hour
mm: Minutes
ss: Seconds

[] indicates that field is optional

In your examples 1803141400 means: 2018 mar 14, 14.00 and touch will change time stamp of test1 and test2 files according to this value.

$ ls -l test1 test2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 yourUser yourGroup 0 mar 14  2018 test1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 yourUser yourGroup 0 mar 14  2018 test2