[Techtalk] what the heck is it with locale and ls -l

[Wim De Smet]

Hey,

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 5:02 AM, Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> wrote:
> So...any Linux gurus out there who can explain why locale is such a moving
> target? Check this out:
>
> [carla at fedora etc]$ ls -l --time-style locale
> -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 46 Jan 11 11:29 adjtime
> -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1518 Aug 16 2011 aliases
>
> carla at mint /etc $ ls -l --time-style locale
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10 2012-02-17 17:16 adjtime
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-10-12 08:11 akonadi
>
> Both report the same locale-- en_US.UTF-8. So why does Fedora use the
> irritating date formatting where dates in the current year omit the year?
> While Mint formats all dates exactly the same, in long-iso? ls is not aliased
> for date formatting on either system. I seem to recall Debian wobbling back
> and forth on this too, with some releases defaulting to full-iso, while other
> releases used the Fedora style.

Setting LC_TIME to "C" produces the weird names (apparently it's the
POSIX way of formatting them). It could simply be you do not have the
locale installed you're trying to use (check locale -a), and it's
falling back to the C locale.

Wim