The Daytime Protocol is a service in the Internet Protocol Suite, defined in 1983 in RFC 867 by Jon Postel.
It is intended for testing and measurement purposes in computer networks.
The server returns an ASCII character string of the current date and time in an unspecified format.
On UNIX-like operating systems a daytime server is usually built into the inetd (or xinetd) daemon.
It may be enabled by adding the following lines to the file /etc/inetd.conf and telling inetd to reload its configuration: An example output may be: