Linux date command not working

It turns out I had to change time/date settings from automatic to manual in System Settings. As I am doing everything through ssh I could not do this in the gui settings, but the equivalent command on terminal is:

$ timedatectl set-ntp false

This disables the automatic time sync allowing me to set the time and date manually using the date command


Look though the process list printed by

ps -ef

to see for likely culprits. These may include

  • ntpd
  • ntpdate
  • systemd-timesyncd
  • ...

In my case, I had to do

systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd