A machine with no working time synchronisation is running four minutes fast, and you must correct the system clock by hand to 2026-03-01 09:00:00. Which command does that?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 107. Administrative tasks medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct date -s "2026-03-01 09:00:00"
Correct. -s (--set) sets the system clock to the time given, and requires the privileges to do so.
Not correct date -d "2026-03-01 09:00:00"
Wrong. -d parses the string and prints the resulting time. It is a calculator and formatter for arbitrary dates and never touches the clock.
Not correct date --utc "2026-03-01 09:00:00"
Wrong. --utc (-u) only asks that input and output be interpreted in UTC. It sets nothing, and a bare non-option argument here is not a valid format string.
Not correct hwclock --hctosys
Wrong direction, and wrong value. --hctosys copies the hardware clock into the system clock, so it would install whatever the RTC currently holds rather than the time you specified. --systohc is the reverse copy you would run afterwards.
Why
date -d and date -s look similar and do opposite things: one displays a computed time, the other installs it. The plus-prefixed argument is a third case again, a format string for output, as in `date +%Y-%m-%d`. After setting the system clock by hand, `hwclock --systohc` writes it through to the RTC so that the correction survives a reboot; on a systemd host `timedatectl set-time` performs both steps.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page date(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 107 and space the ones you get wrong.
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