Add x seconds to the current date in Linux

Question

I have two Linux (CentOS 6.0) machines over here and I need to add (or remove) 5 seconds to the current date time. In the end, both my machines would have a gap of 5 seconds (on

Answer 1

You can add 5 seconds to the current time in one command using date -s "5 seconds".

Answer 2

Actually, Linux comes with a handy function to return a time plus a modifier.

date --date='5 seconds'

You can test it from the command line with a simple

date && date --date='5 seconds'

Using this you can just write a small batch file that sets a variable to the time you want and then runs the set command.

EDIT: here's a bash script that will do it for you. It needs to be run as root

#!/bin/bash

NEWDATE=`date +%T --date '5 seconds'`;
date +%T -s "$NEWDATE";