
When you give the 'date' command it normally prints time and date. The output looks like this:
$ date
Sun May 15 13:15:36 BST 2011
If you only want to print the time, use 'cut' with -c.
$ date | cut -c 12-19
13:15:46
Here we pipe 'date' output to 'cut' and cut everything except columns 12 - 19.
We only get the time to display.
Try it on text strings.
Done!