How to set system time from Terminal while booted from 10.6.3 server install disk?

Thank you for providing the date/time format, it worked perfectly for me.

I'd just like to add the reason I needed to do this was because the battery had died in a MacBook Air and the time & date had been reset to 2014.

This caused a problem with the online reinstall of Mavericks because the certificates on the apple servers could not be trusted and the install failed due to timeouts and errors.

The time & date of the current certificates would appear to be 'in the future' compared to the local system time & date.

Being connected to the Internet did not auto-update the time & date as expected.

Once booted, launch Terminal from the Utilities menu, then use the command line tool date:

> date 042109582011

which, believe it or not, sets the date to 09:58 on Apr 21st, 2011

(man date has the details on the date format)

You need to put full year in if you didnt figure that out already. I personally keep forgetting this old terminal command, beause I come accross this a lot.

Terminal:

date 112611052013

translated to lamens terms.:

date nov 26th 11:05 2013.

Hope this helps for anyone else coming across this posting.

Once you have the D & T corerctly set, go to Apple menu / System Preferences / Date & Time, click the Date & Time tab, and check the box to set date and time automatically.

As long as you have an internet connection you will have the correct D & T.

Just want to say that I was having this same problem, and your solution has worked perfectly! Mavericks is finally starting to install. Thank you thank you thank you!!!!!!

Hey, i just run in to something similar, tonight while trying to fix a computer.🙂

The user set the time and date on his computer to 1998 and computer locked everything including time and date in system preferences, and his user account basicly making him from administrator to guest. he could not almost any program properly that required administrator privilages.

to fix this we used this comand in terminal " sudo date 201703162014 " todays time and date

20:17 03/16 2014

we tryed everything and this fixed in 2 seconds

ps: when you type sudo in terminal it whil give you a warning the improper use of this command is bad.... click continue.otherwhise you will not be able to execute the command.

thanks again for this post and have a great day

Hey guys!

I was been this problem, I changed date & time to 1995... and the mac blocked all application, so try in terminal:

sudo date 032913152015

Using this format:

usage: date [-jnu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ...

[-f fmt date | [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]

THANKS A LOT OF!😁

Jen, your post is just what I needed for Mavericks. And thanks for putting it in "layman's" terms. ;-)

Perfect thanks. I guess I was looking at old posts and only put in the last two numbers of the year.

thank you Camelot🙂

This will not work if there's no system on the machine, to begin with. The terminal prompts are the only way around it.

I know this is an old thread but you helped me out so much today thank you for this info I was getting frustrated now it’s workinh bea