date command output linux

Question

On one system I'm getting date command output like below

system1# date 
Thu Oct 18 10:34:36 BST 2018

while another similar box is showing it like

system2#date 
Thu 18 Oct 10:34:50 BST 2018

Both showing Month at different column. When I do an

env LC_ALL=C date

on the system2 , I get it in normal way as "Thu Oct 18 10:34:36 BST 2018"

on both system, the local shows same without any difference.

#locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

any idea

Answer 1

So you get the output in the US format (when LC_ALL is set to the default) or you get it in the English variant.

Note that the strange order in the date format used by the US people is used in very few other countries as well...and definitely not in England

So if you like the same output on both system, set up the same locale on both systems or use the explicit date format:

date '+%a %b %e %T %Z %Y'

This example uses the date format that is the default for the C locale.

Answer 2

If you want to have a standard date output, use the ISO 8601 flag

robert@pip2:/tmp$ date
Thu May 30 07:16:51 PDT 2019
robert@pip2:/tmp$ date --iso-8601
2019-05-30
robert@pip2:/tmp$