Forcing "date" to use a locale other than the machine default

Question

Is there a way to force the *nix command "date" to output in a specific format independent of the local? For example, if I call "date -u" today, on a US machine I get:

Mon Oct 15 13:15:29 UTC 2012

but on a German machine I get:

Mo 15. Okt 13:15:31 UTC 2012

Celebrity

Answer 1

Sure, you can always specify the format yourself:

date +%a, %b %d

or you can use a temporary environmental variable:

:~$ LC_ALL=de_DE.utf8 date
Mo 15. Okt 15:34:11 CEST 2012
:~$ date
Mon Oct 15 15:33:24 CEST 2012

As you see, only the first command is run with the German locale.

Drawing

additionally you can use locale -a to list the installed locales which will work for the LC_ALL variable – Irwinirwinn

I can't make it work the other way around. For example LC_ALL=it_IT.utf8 date -d'1 gennaio 2017' +%Y%m%d says: date: invalid date ‘1 gennaio 2017’ – Tedious

"In the current implementation, only English is supported for words and abbreviations like ‘AM’, ‘DST’, ‘EST’, ‘first’, ‘January’, ‘Sunday’, ‘tomorrow’, and ‘year’." (info page for date) – Drawing

The correct variable is LC_TIME, that is LC_TIME=de_DE.utf8 date. It might not matter for the single command, but since the page is the first search result for a general query, it's probably worth mentioning. – Baronage

In my shell I had to put date's parameters in a quote like this: date +"%a, %b %d" – Khudari

@Baronage You are correct that LC_TIME affects how the date is printed but LC_ALL has a higher priority. I.e. if LC_ALL is set then LC_TIME is ignored. Therefore setting just LC_TIME does not guarantee a correct language. – Beatrizbeattie

@Beatrizbeattie right, that does not mean though that setting LC_ALL instead of LC_TIME just to change time format is the correct solution. Rather it means that you might want to check that LC_ALL is not set. It is often the case that one wants to get a 24h time format instead of the AM/PM one, but they do not want to change the language (which is gonna happen if you set LC_ALL). – Baronage

Actually, I'm sorry, but I figured I'll give this answer a downvote until it is edited. Because LC_ALL should only really be used for debugging purposes, exactly because you lose the more fine-grained control over the rest of LC_* variables. As a result of this answer people may set LC_ALL in the environment, and later then stumble upon problems similar to what @Beatrizbeattie mentioned. Nothing good in that. – Baronage

nice, however, LC_ALL=es_ES.utf8; date --utc --date "30 dic 2023 16:35:20 GMT-8" +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M" does not work as expected. – Voodooism

Answer 2

You can modify the environment date runs in. I don't know if this is the best way (the variables used in locale handling are numerous), but the following works:

$ LANG=de_DE date
Mo 15 Okt 2012 09:34:12 EDT

(January beat me to this answer by a minute or so, but I'll leave my answer up in the hopes that some will clarify which variable (LC_ALL, LANG, other) is most "appropriate".)

Speer

Your answer is more "appropriate", examples from POSIX standard: LANG=da_DK.iso_8859-1 date, LANG=De_DE.88591 date. – Saltigrade

Definitions from POSIX: Lang can be used by applications to determine the language to use for error messages and instructions, collating sequences, date formats, and so on. LC_ALL determine the values for all locale categories and has precedence over any of the other environment variables. – Saltigrade

Answer 3

LC_TIME is enough, you can use this.

LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"  date

Vanessa

Answer 4

Install the language-pack-xx

First, make sure that the language package of the target locale is installed. On Debian-derived GNU/Linux distributions, Dutch language support is installed as follows:

$ sudo apt install language-pack-nl

This command will automatically also install language-pack-nl-base. Here is what I get by specifying LC_TIME. This is more specific than using LC_ALL. (Specifying LANG does not work on Xubuntu LTS.)

$ date '+%A %e %B %Y'
Friday 16 October 2015

$ LC_TIME='nl_BE.UTF-8' date '+%A %e %B %Y'
vrijdag 16 oktober 2015

Humidify

Doesn't work for me :-( LC_TIME='de_DE.UTF-8' date '+%A %e %B %Y' gives Saturday 3 December 2022 – Flagpole

@framp: did you do install language-pack-de before trying? and is de_DE.utf8 included in the output of locale -a ? – Unlawful

Answer 5

Have you tried the following? (which I got from the date manual pages)

# date -u +"%a %b %d %T %Z %Y"

Lipase

Thanks, this is a step in the right direction, but I want the day and month names (which are in German on a German machine) to switch to English as well. – Celebrity

Answer 6

UTC:

date -u -R

Local:

date -R

Parthenia

Answer 7

First, uncomment your desired locale(s) lines in /etc/locale.gen then run locale-gen (both as root). Make sure your terminal supports the required encoding so the characters will get shown.

You can then specify a "temporary" locale for the run-time of one command like this:

LC_ALL="de_DE.UTF-8" date

Khudari

Answer 8

you can also use this knowledge to write date and time information used in scripts for the benefit of speakers of other languages, for example:

    LC_TIME="es_PR.utf8" date '+El programa concluyó el %A, %e de %B de %Y, a las %H horas, %M minutos'

Creamer