Description of problem: The short version of month names in zh_CN starts with a space for January through September. But the space is not actually part of the month name, I'm sure, even if I don't know any Chinese. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): glibc-2.5-49.el5_5.7 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. for i in `seq 1 12` ; do LANG=zh_CN.utf8 date -d `printf 2010%02d01 $i` +%b ; done Actual results: 1月 2月 3月 4月 5月 6月 7月 8月 9月 10月 11月 12月 Expected results: 1月 2月 3月 4月 5月 6月 7月 8月 9月 10月 11月 12月 Additional info: I guess the reason for the spaces is to make these names have the same length in a display. And when printing, it maybe doesn't cause problems too often. But when reading a date with strptime(), it causes problems if the pattern is space separated. Using a strptime() pattern like "%Y.%b.%d" can be made to work. It requires that the input really has a space in the month name, so "2010. 1月.26" would be accepted, while "2010.1月.26" would not. It could be surprising for a human entering the time. If the date is space separated, it gets worse. If the pattern is e.g. "%Y %b %d" there is no way to enter a date in months other than October, November, or December. The space after %Y will match any number of spaces in the input. There will never be any space "left" to become part of the month name.
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Technical note added. If any revisions are required, please edit the "Technical Notes" field accordingly. All revisions will be proofread by the Engineering Content Services team. New Contents: Same as RHEL 6.3 BZ 785984
Since the problem described in this bug report should be resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated files, follow the link below. If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2013-0022.html