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I've always seen 24h time shown in the date output. But for some reason, my Debian-based machine is now showing 12h time format:

$ date
Fri 10 Jun 2022 06:16:47 PM IDT

$ LC_TIME=en_IL.UTF-8 date
Fri 10 Jun 2022 06:17:00 PM IDT


$ LC_ALL=en_IL.UTF-8 date
Fri 10 Jun 2022 18:17:05 IDT

I don't think that I changed anything relevant lately.

$ grep LC_ ~/.bashrc
export LC_TIME="en_DK.UTF-8"
$ grep LC_ ~/.profile 
$ locale
LANG=en_IL.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

What else should I check or configure?

My goal would be to have these features:

  • 24h time format
  • YYYY-MM-DD date format
  • Week starts on Sunday
  • Text in English
  • Beer served below room temp, but not at refrigerator levels of cold
  • UTF-8 encoding

In these applications:

  • Bash commands, such as date.
  • Anki
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • KeepassXC
  • LibreOffice
  • KDE Applications, such as Okular and Dolphin
  • Gnome applications

My setup is KDE 5.18.8 on Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS. I have no problem updating to 22.04 if necessary.

dotancohen
  • 15,864
  • @thanasisp: file /etc/locale.conf ... No such file or directory. Should I just create that file? I would prefer that all user-specific configs (which these are) would be done in the /home/ directory. Not only because it is best practice, but also so that it will be backed up properly. – dotancohen Jun 10 '22 at 21:10
  • I think no, I am on different OS. I suggest you as a workaround to set LC_TIME=POSIX using the preferred Ubuntu method. Probably it is a bug after an update about locale en_US*. – thanasisp Jun 10 '22 at 21:14
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    Yeah, if you have a UK-type locale, the beer will be room temp. :) – paul garrett Jun 10 '22 at 21:37
  • @thanasisp: Setting LC_TIME in fact did not resolve the issue. I set it in bashrc and also tried setting it on the bash CLI when invoking date. – dotancohen Jun 11 '22 at 10:18
  • I have everything en_US.utf8 except LC_ALL= empty and LC_TIME=POSIX. – thanasisp Jun 11 '22 at 10:26

1 Answers1

4

Your times are shown in 12h format because of this setting:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

This overrides your LC_TIME setting, and produces 12h times.

Presumably something changed recently to produce this LC_ALL setting in your environment. grep -r LC_ALL /etc should tell you where.

See also What is the difference between LANG=C and LC_ALL=C? for context on LANG v. LC_ALL.

Stephen Kitt
  • 434,908
  • 1
    Thank you! On my work machine, with the same ~/.bashrc and ~/.profile files, in fact LC_ALL is not set. And that work machine displays date output properly. When I get home I'll grep around /etc on the affected machine. – dotancohen Jun 13 '22 at 08:32