I am trying to determine how to customize the date and time display of system utilities and user programs using the locale settings. What I really want is some sort of utility program that does the same thing for CentOS as the Regions Settings Control Panel app. for MicroSoft Windows accomplishes, but I have no hope of seeing that.
I have traced the login locale processing through /etc/profile /etc/profile.s/*.sh and ~/.bash_profile and have decided to work backwards from ~/.bash_profile. What I initially wish to accomplish is to set the date and time display (only) to iso-8601 format. I infer from what I have read that setting LC_TIME to "i18n.UTF-8" "should" accomplish this (presumably referring to /usr/share/i18n/locales/i18n). But when I add the following two lines to ~/.bash_profile I do not get any change to the date and time display in ls and further I get an error when I run locale saying that the language file could not be found.
~/.bash_profile --->
+ LC_TIME='"i18n.UTF-8"' + export LC_TIME
<---
After I do this and log back in then when I run locale I see this:
# locale locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory LANG=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_TIME="i18n.UTF-8" <---------- set as expected LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_ALL= # # ll -d D* drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 12 09:05 Desktop # exit
Note the error message regarding LC_ALL and the failure to change the date display.
Without those two lines in ~/.bash_profile I get this instead:
# locale LANG=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8" LC_ALL= # # ll -d D* drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 12 09:05 Desktop #
The error message disappears. Can somebody tell me a.) what is going on? and b.) how does one customize just the date and time display using locales?
As I am a digest subscriber, the favour of a direct copy of any reply to the list is requested.
SIncerely,