Hide Forgot
Description of Problem: "Date --date" always assumes US-ordered mm/dd/YYYY regardless of locale setting. The US is the only country that uses the illogical mm/dd/YYYY dates; everyone else uses dd/mm/YYYY. There is currently no locale setting to control this. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.0.1 How Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. date --date 1/12/2001 +%m 2. date --date 2001/12/1 +%m 3. Actual Results: 1. 1 2. 12 Expected Results: 1. 12 2. 12 Additional Information: Either need to add something to locale definitions, or have "date" examine LC_TIME and take special action if xx_US
This is true; however, people (and their scripts) have come to expect this behavior because it has been that way forever. I'm not sure this should be fixed.
It should be fixed. The longer it is left then the more people might make more erroneous assumptions in their scripts. And since the --date option accepts fairly free-form input (eg 2002/02/01, or 02/01/2002) it should conform with user's locale. Usually the date will derive from other data in locale's format. A fix will not affect any US script and us foreigners would really appreciate a fix because all our dates appear as 01/02/2002 and it is just plain silly if we have to mangle the date just to satisfy the --date option. Surely that is what locale's are all about - fixing this sort of problem!
Unfortunately, in this case, "fixing" the problem could cause more harm than it is worth. I think that the only real solution would be to extend the date command with a --localedate command, so as not to break existing usage, as Bero mentions.
But "... could cause more harm than it is worth ..." never stopped someone from changing "ls" collation order! A correction would not affact ANY user in the USA. It is a bug because it doesn't behave as expected. Moreover any workaround will usually involve the transformation of dd/mm/yyyy to yyyy/mm/dd because the latter form is unambiguous and always works. I couldn't imagine anybody doing a transformation of dd/mm/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy as a workaround.
POSIX (which demanded the collation order change) mandates the current date behavior.