Different representations of time in ls -l and date(1)

Corinna Vinschen corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com
Wed Aug 31 17:41:00 GMT 2016


On Aug 31 15:23, Schwarz, Konrad wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > > > So my problem is that date(1) outputs AM/PM style dates, whereas ls
> > > > -
> > > l
> > > > uses 24 hour times.
> > > >
> > > > $ ls -l rtos_benchmark.lst
> > > > -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 mchn1350 Domain Users 263 Aug 31 13:14
> > > > rtos_benchmark.lst*
> > > > $ date
> > > > Wed, Aug 31, 2016  1:39:35 PM
> > > > $ echo $LC_TIME
> > > >
> > > > $ echo $LANG
> > > > en_US.UTF-8
> > > >
> > > > Shouldn't they be using the same format?
> > >
> > > Further experimentation shows that they do indeed use the same format
> > > in the POSIX locale, (LANG=C), as required by that standard.
> > >
> > > However, I still think it is an ugly inconsistency for them to differ
> > > in the en_US.UTF-8 locale (which I assume is the default locale in
> > > Cygwin).
> > 
> > Still further investigation shows that on SUSE Linux, with
> > LANG=en_US.UTF-8, both of these utilities consistently, if counter-
> > intuitively, display 24 hour time.
> > 
> > So I think the problem lies in Cygwin's locale database.
> 
> [Cygwin's locale database is Windows' locale database]
> 
> On my Windows 7 machine, Control Panel, Region and Language, Formats shows
> Short time: h:mm tt
> Long time: h:mm:ss tt
> AM Symbol: AM
> PM Symbol: PM
> 
> This is the standard English (United States) setting.
> 24 hour format is represented in Windows by either H:mm or HH:mm.
> 
> Shouldn't ls -l therefore be using a 12 hour format?

Cygwin has a conversion routine, which converts the Windows date/time
input strings to POSIX-compatible strftime strings for digestion by
applicatrions calling nl_langinfo.

I just checked:

  Input:  "h:mm:ss tt"
  Output: "%l:%M:%S %p"

This looks pretty much like a 12hour AM?PM format to me.

If ls uses what Cygwin provides for the default time format, then it
does.  But note Eric's mail in this thread:
https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2016-08/msg00630.html


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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