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21.1.1 Specifying the format of date output

If given an argument that starts with a ‘+’, date prints the current date and time (or the date and time specified by the --date option, see below) in the format defined by that argument, which is similar to that of the strftime function. Except for conversion specifiers, which start with ‘%’, characters in the format string are printed unchanged. The conversion specifiers are described below.

• Time conversion specifiers
• Date conversion specifiers
• Literal conversion specifiers
• Padding and other flags