Get date in Windows CMD script

Apparently it depends on the Windows installation language, how the date function or %DATE% environment variable is formatted. So here is a very ugly hack to get a julian date (YYYYMMDDHHiiss) in a Windows batch script, independent off system locale settings:

1. @echo off
2. FOR /F "usebackq tokens=1-10 delims=+|NOW():- " %%a IN (`mysql -e "SELECT NOW();" -u root -ptest`) DO set datetime=%%a%%b%%c%%d%%e%%f
3. echo %datetime%

Notice that this requires MySQL. If you do not like to use your MySQL root code, you can create a new user with absolutely no rights granted.

But again, this solution is stupid, I hope you will never need it or use it. I just thought I would share, since it was driving my co-worker crazy, and we ended up using it to name a MySQL dump.