On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 07:55:40PM +0300, Marko Myllynen wrote:
Hi,
[CC'ing Keld with whom this issue was discussed some years ago]
On 2015-05-12 18:49, Pádraig Brady wrote:
On 12/05/15 16:40, Pádraig Brady wrote:
On 12/05/15 14:51, Michael Stone wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 03:36:17PM +0200, op...@mumm.ac.be wrote:
I'm just upgrading my server from debian 7 (wheezy) to debian 8 (jessie)
and several of my scripts are not working anymore. After some tests, it
turns out that the problem likely comes from the fact the 'date'
function does not work as expected.
In wheezy, the command line
date /bin/date +%Y%m%d.%p
would have returned
20150512.PM
In jessie, the same command line returns
20150512.
omitting PM.
As a consequence of this omission, my scripts are crashing.
Have you got any idea why this is happening?
I can't reproduce it:
/bin/date +%Y%m%d.%p
20150512.AM
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a locale issue. What does
env LANG=C LC_ALL=C /bin/date +%Y%m%d.%p
return?
If that works, what does
locale
return when run by itself?
%p is blank in many locales unfortunately.
You can see the am_pm vary with these commands:
$ LC_ALL=en_IE locale -k LC_TIME
$ LC_TIME=C locale -k LC_TIME
$ LC_ALL=zh_CN.utf8 date +%p
??
$ LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 date +%p
PM
$ LC_ALL=en_US date +%p
PM
locales with blank am_pm should be fixed up to allow one to
get an explicit 12 hour format like `date +%I:%m%p` for example.
Note some locales (like en_GB for example) default
to 24 hour (t_fmt=%T), and also provide an am_pm entry,
which is the correct behavior in my opinion.
I see that https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Locales states:
am_pm and t_fmt_ampm - should be empty if using 24 hour time
Marko, that seems incorrect?
At least am_pm should be populated to
allow users to generate 12 hour time with strftime?
I can't find references to the discussion I had with Keld earlier but
the rationale for not populating it was along the lines:
1) am_pm should be populated only if AM/PM convention is used to signal
applications they should not try to print them when using them is
unwanted. Seems that only the locale(5) commit messages, not the page
itself, spell this out:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=b5d4168adfb426f45108ac2bf7c8b17b126b07a1
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=0c2dbad182e40db2ca47128f229ca7dbd83e179f
2) what unwanted means is that in many cases 12 hour time with AM/PM
notation is alien thus generating such time representation under those
locales would be illogical (e.g. 5.34 ip. in Finnish context is
completely unnatural).
The same goes for various name_* keywords in LC_NAME, defining them for
locales where they are not used would not allow signaling applications
that under those locales their usage is unwanted.
I think that when running scripts you should ensure that the correct
locale is used, and in most cases that would be the C locale.
Better set it explicitely.
Best regards
keld
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