How To Find Installation Date and Time of Linux OS

Introduction

Hi guys, In this tutorial, We will illustrate a few ways to find Linux OS’s installation date and time.

Here are some methods below to get the OS’s installation date and time

stat / | grep "Birth" | sed 's/Birth: //g' | cut -b 2-11

stat command will display file status in Linux with some manipulation tools such as sed editor and cut as shown above.

Also you can use awk with stat to display Linux installation date as shown below

stat / | awk '/Birth: /{print $1,$2}'

The installation date and time of my Linux OS is Jul 26, 2021.

Also you can use stat command without sed, cut and awk as per stat command has a flag to check Linux installation date and time, just run the below command

stat -c %w /

On Debian based systems, search in the syslog to get Linux OS installation date and time as shown below

sudo head -n1 /var/log/installer/syslog

If these logs were deleted or you couldn’t find them, you can find the installation date with another way like below, just run the command:

fs=$(df / | tail -1 | cut -f1 -d' ') && tune2fs -l $fs | grep created

You can get Installation date with the Basesystem which defines the components of a basic Linux system such as the package installation, to use the Basesystem to find the Installation date and time, run the command below:

rpm -qi basesystem

Also you can use grep with the previous command as follows to only get the needed output:

rpm -qi basesystem | grep -i date

rpm -q basesystem --qf '%{installtime:date}\n'

Also you can download this script and run it then you will get the Installation date, So download it with the command belwo

wget -O installdate.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alicela1n/install-date/main/install-date

chmod +x installdate.sh

./installdate.sh

That’s it

We showed you how to find Linux OS’s installation date and time with some ways, you can choose one of them to do that.

Thanks