Python script to reset date and time

Question

Some time ago, this post appeared asking how to use Python to change system date and time. The answer by Amir on that post worked for me, and I'm able to use his same script to change my computers date and time as displayed on the bottom-right of my screen to whatever I want it to. However, I'm now trying to create a second, slightly modified script to reset date and time to what it should be in real time. So the idea is, I can execute one script and then change my system date and time. Then, I execute a second script and reset the system date and time to what it "should be", in real time, as it was before I ran the first script. I've not been able to figure it out so far though. In Amir's script, the following code was used;

time_tuple = (2012,  # Year
              9,  # Month
              6,  # Day
              0,  # Hour
              38,  # Minute
              0,  # Second
              0,  # Millisecond
              )

I thought I'd be able to make this work by simply making the following modification;

import time
time_tuple = time.gmtime()[0:7]

The <time.gmtime()[0:7]> hypothetically has a tuple which contains the real, present-time at the moment. And I used [0:7] to match the seven values in the original tuple. But when I run this code, it does not reset my computers system date and time to real-time. (It doesn't help when I remove the [0:7].) Does anyone know something that will work here?

After changing the time, try `print(time.gmtime())` and you may begin to see what the problem is here. — Greg Hewgill, Nov 23 '21 at 06:51
@GregHewgill Ah, I see ... changing system date and time also changes the output of time.gmtime(), so I can't use it to convert back just like that. Is there any other way to access current time that isn't affected by running the first script? — arara, Nov 23 '21 at 15:31

arara · Answer 1 · 2021-11-24T01:42:30.717

Thanks a lot to the info by @Greg Hewgill. I was able to solve my problem above using the following, if anyone was interested. I got the API information from http://worldtimeapi.org/. The tuple code I built was;

import requests
timeapi = requests.get("http://worldtimeapi.org/api/timezone/Etc/GMT")
tuple_info = timeapi.json()['datetime']
year = int(tuple_info[0:4])
month = int(tuple_info[5:7])
day = int(tuple_info[8:10])
hour = int(tuple_info[11:13])
minute = int(tuple_info[14:16])
second= int(tuple_info[17:19])
millisecond = 0
api_tuple = (year,month,day,hour,minute,second,millisecond)

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 23 '21 at 20:12

1

After changing your system time, your computer only knows the new time. It does not "remember" the original time, so that's why time.gmtime() also returned the new time.

To have your computer learn what the real world time is again, the input has to come from somewhere outside your computer. You can either type in the current time manually, or you could write a script to call some time API service. I found several freely available ones by searching for "time api".

answered Nov 23 '21 at 20:12

Greg Hewgill

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Thanks! I'm a huge Python noob, only began this stuff like one or two weeks ago. But I was able to learn enough about APIs from your suggestion that I got this to work with API data from http://worldtimeapi.org/. In the next few mins, I'm going to add an answer myself to this to show the solution I managed. – arara Nov 24 '21 at 00:55

Python script to reset date and time

2 Answers2