Forcing “date” to use a locale other than the machine default

August 12, 2023 by Tarik

Sure, you can always specify the format yourself:

date +%a, %b %d

or you can use a temporary environmental variable:

:~$ LC_ALL=de_DE.utf8 date
Mo 15. Okt 15:34:11 CEST 2012
:~$ date
Mon Oct 15 15:33:24 CEST 2012

As you see, only the first command is run with the German locale.