The Practical PowerShell Get Date to Demystify Date and Time

There are many different formatting identifiers available, and we will not list them all here but can be referenced here. To use this, let us show the example of adding two days and five hours to a date. We can chain the AddDays and the Addhours methods onto our date stored in the variable $CurrentDate. You have half the hard work done, converting the information/strings into DateTime objects.

Just like with the date format, we can choose between .Net format and UFormat specifiers to format the DateTime result of Get-Date in PowerShell. Thus, the article covered in detail in the various date time formats along with examples. The best way to learn about each format available is to try out each format and understand which is suitable for the script need. You’ll C++ Data Types Top 3 Most Useful Different Data Types of C++ see as soon as you use the Format parameter, Get-Date no longer returns a DateTime object but now strings a string. Use the New-TimeSpan cmdlet by providing a Start and End date/time as parameters. For example, if you’d like to find the difference between November 23rd, 2020 at midnight to December 31st, 2020 at midnight, you could use the following code snippet.

Examples of Various PowerShell Date

Create a free account today to participate in forum conversations, comment on posts and more. There are a handful of static functions that are very useful as well. 2699 PowerShell says “execution of scripts is disabled on this system.”

To cast a string to a DateTime object, preface the string with . When you do this, PowerShell tries to interpret the string as a date and time then provides you with all of the properties and methods available on this object type. With Get-Date we can get the current date and time which is often used in PowerShell scripts to timestamp the output or in combination with logging. But besides timestamping, we can also use dates to compare or calculate the age of files, or in filters to select only a specific range from a result set. The System.DateTime object that PowerShell Get Date command returns has various methods you can invoke to add or remove chunks of time. If you run Get-Date | Get-Member, you’ll see various methods that start with Add.

Since we know that the Get-Date command outputs a DateTime object, is there more that we can do with this object? Not that we will go into every method, but there are a few methods that are very useful to use. The following are a handful of functions that are available for use with an existing DateTime objects. You can use either the -Format parameter or the -UFormat parameter. The latter parameter uses the Unix formatting syntax whereas the former uses .NET formatting syntax. In the below code example we demonstrate an example using both.

We can simply pass in a date and time to have a proper DateTime object returned as seen below. Comparing dates in PowerShell is actually easier than you might think. The DateTime objects can be compared directly with each other using the normal PowerShell comparison operators -gt and -lt for example. As you can see, we need to wrap the Get-Date cmdlet in parentheses. This way the Get-Date cmdlet is executed first, and then the other commands or methods. Good to know though is that specifiers of UFormat are changed since PowerShell 6.2.

By default, PowerShell Get Date command looks like it only returns the current date and time but, in reality, it’s actually returning a lot more information. To find this information pipe the output to the Format-List cmdlet as shown below. The UFormat parameter is similar to the Format parameter in that you can combine date format characters to change how the date is returned as a string. For example, try out the following formats and see what’s returned. Now that you are aware of the basic methods of using dates, it’s time to delve deeper into the topic.

Instead, you should use the DateTime objects https://bitcoin-mining.biz/ themselves to perform the comparison.

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Let’s play around a bit more by using different formats to display dates. Different operating system languages may use different date and time formats. When you use Get-Culture you are able to return a localization object that PowerShell can use to return a localized string. This means that you will have to convert the DateTime object to a string type and pass the localization that you want. To format dates in PowerShell we can use Get-Date with either the .Net format or the UFormat specifier. The .Net format specifier uses the more commonly known letters to specify the format, whereas UFormat uses % followed by a letter.

Doesn’t answer question and it has a typo in last line so doesn’t even work. I need to have AD User Account Expiration Date and now how many months and date its remain until will be disabled. You can see an example of using the ToShortDateString() and ToShortTimeString() methods below.

• I hope you found this article helpful, if you have any questions, just drop a comment below.
• For example, if you’d like to find the difference between November 23rd, 2020 at midnight to December 31st, 2020 at midnight, you could use the following code snippet.
• Doesn’t answer question and it has a typo in last line so doesn’t even work.
• One of the easiest ways to discover the current date with PowerShell is by using the Get-Date cmdlet.
• What if the string you are passing in doesn’t fit any known format?

To do this we are going to use the New-TimeSpan cmdlet with two date objects. The first method simply returns the number of days in any given month when passed a year and month number. Parse attempts to create a DateTime object out of a given string using common formats. What if the string you are passing in doesn’t fit any known format?

Many scripts require simple or complex date calculations for such things as archiving files or logic to determine what data to operate on. Learn how to effectively work with dates and times in PowerShell in this article using the Get-Date cmdlet, DateTime class, and the New-TimeSpan cmdlet. If you check the type of object Get-Date returns, you’ll notice it’s a System.DateTime object type.

You can see a few examples of the characters you can use with the Format parameter. You’d like to parse this file and find all of the rows with a date seven days or older. #Subtracting 8 days from the current date using a negative number. As you can see, Thursday is now returned in the Dutch language using the nl-NL encoding. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I hope you found this article helpful, if you have any questions, just drop a comment below.

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So keep that in mind when running your script on different PowerShell versions. You can just do normal arithmetic on dates, but if there are no months, it will return $null not 0. PowerShell provides a number of cmdlets to retrieve current date time and to create time span object. Using TimeSpan objects, you can find date/time differences in just about any increment you’d like. One of the easiest ways to discover the current date with PowerShell is by using the Get-Date cmdlet. This command displays the current date and time as shown below.

In both cases, the output is a string object and not a date object. One way to change the date format of a DateTime object is by using Get-Date to generate the object and the Format parameter to change the format. The Format parameter accepts a string of characters each representing how a date/time string should look. Not only can you find differences in dates and times but you can also compare them using standard PowerShell operators.

Get-Date – How to get and use Dates in PowerShell

This class is what exposes all of the different properties and methods you see. You can discover it’s object type by using Get-Member or using the GetType() as shown below. How many times have you had to figure out what date was X days, months, or years ago, or perhaps what time was Y minutes, hours, or seconds ago? Producing a report of all the users who have not logged in during the past 90 days is a pretty common request. It’s very easy to calculate date and time math with Windows PowerShell. The .NET Framework includes two data structures that you can use for calculating all sorts of date math – DateTime and TimeSpan.

Now you only need to remove the formatting portion in the if statement to make sure you don’t convert back into strings. Before you can work with dates in PowerShell, you will need to make sure that the dates are DateTime objects. For example, when you have a CSV file with dates in it, that you would like to use. To format the DateTime in PowerShell using the UFormat specifier, you will need to use the parameter -Uformat followed by a string with the format. You can find all options for UFormat here in the documentation.