\today

Synopsis:

\today

Produce today’s date in the format ‘month dd, yyyy’. An example of a date in that format is ‘July 4, 1976’.

Multilingual packages such as babel or polyglossia, or classes such as lettre, will localize \today. For example, the following will output ‘4 juillet 1976’:

\year=1976 \month=7 \day=4
\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[french]{babel}
\begin{document}
\today
\end{document}

\today uses the counters \day, \month, and \year (see \day & \month & \year).

A number of package on CTAN work with dates. One is datetime package which can produce a wide variety of date formats, including ISO standards.

The date is not updated as the LaTeX process runs, so in principle the date could be incorrect by the time the program finishes.