You can use the following methods to get a particular month name in Bash:
Method 1: Get Full Month Name (e.g. “October”)
date +%B
Method 2: Get Abbreviated Month Name (e.g. “Oct”)
date +%b
The following examples show how to use each method in practice.
Example 1: Get Full Month Name in Bash
This article is currently being written on April 5th, 2024.
We can use the following syntax to get the full month name for the current date in Bash:
date +%B
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns April, which is the full name of the current month.
If you want to extract the full month name from a specific date, you can use the following syntax instead:
date -d 2024-10-15 '+%B'
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns October, which represents the full month name for the date 2024-10-15 that we specified.
Example 2: Get Abbreviated Month Name in Bash
We can use the following syntax to get the abbreviated month name for the current date in Bash:
date +%b
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns Apr, which is the abbreviated name of the current month.
If you want to extract the abbreviated month name from a specific date, you can use the following syntax instead:
date -d 2024-10-15 '+%b'
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
This returns Oct, which represents the abbreviated month name for the date 2024-10-15 that we specified.
Feel free to use whichever method you prefer depending on whether or not you want to retrieve the full month name or an abbreviated name.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Extract Date from String
Bash: How to Extract Text Between Two Strings
Bash: How to Extract Specific Columns from CSV File
