Increasing amounts of stuff these days uses ISO 8601 date format.

Of course, date(1) isn't one of them, at least without a nice clean single flag on the command line.

If you need "now" in ISO 8601 format in a shell script or staring at you from a terminal, what do you do?

On SmartOS, node.js is already there by default, which makes it pretty easy to springboard off that installation.

Incantation is:

node -e 'console.log(new Date().toISOString());'

Alternate plain-unix-only-only method, courtesy of the README.md for mountain-gorilla:

• TIMESTAMP is an ISO timestamp like "20110729T063329Z". Use:

  TIMESTAMP=$(shell TZ=UTC date "+%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ")    # Makefile
  TIMESTAMP=$(TZ=UTC date "+%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ")          # Bash script