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

[Anthony de Boer]

Carla Schroder wrote:
> [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? 

The first example is the ancient and traditional way that ls has printed
dates since the universe was a much much younger place.  Yes, it's a bit
funky and old-fashioned, but many old-timers like myself are used to it
by now.

IMHO the "irritating date formatting" is the new ISO stuff; getting that
in one's face suddenly one morning because someone had a New And
Innovative Better Idea can be a bit of a shock!

But the joy of Linux as opposed to the closed competition is that it's
open for innovation and people can put various new ideas out there and
give people alternatives and we have configuration choices with stuff
like date formatting and don't have to live with someone else imposing
their idea of how it Ought To Work on us.

-- 
Anthony de Boer