How to accurately determine when the system was booted

It is very easy to tell how long the system has been running using uptime command, but the information when exactly it was booted is not so apparent, so I will show you two different ways to get it.

The first way - the simplest one

Use last command to display the system shutdown entries and run level changes, limit output to the boot entries, and display only the first one.

$ last -x | grep boot | head -1
reboot   system boot  3.2.0-4-amd64    Sat Oct 19 12:44 - 23:24 (8+11:40) 

The following examples demonstrate two simple ways to print the time when the system was booted, each one using different sets of commands.

$ last -x | awk '$3 ~ /boot/  {print $5 " " $6 " " $7 " " $8; exit}'
Sat Oct 19 12:44

$ last -x | grep -m 1 boot | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 5-8
Sat Oct 19 12:44

The second way - the more interesting one

Alternative solution is to read the /proc/uptime file, where the first number is the total number of seconds the system has been up and running.

$ cat /proc/uptime 
735751.39 778420.68

You can accurately determine when the system was booted using date command.

$ date --date "now - `cut -d ' ' -f 1 /proc/uptime` seconds"
Sat Oct 19 12:43:25 CEST 2013

The above-mentioned command construction shortly explains why I think that this solution is more interesting.