Change ls datetime format - how?

[Tom H]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 1:39 PM Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de> wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 05.02.2021, 12:17 +0100 schrieb Bo Berglund:

>>>> I am getting really frustrated by the way the command line on
>> Ubuntu 18.04 displays timestamps of files and directories...
>>
>> When I use ls -l I get this:
>>
>> $ ls -l
>> total 100
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 apr 26  2020 Backups
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 feb  5 11:47 bin
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 maj 26  2020 Desktop
>> drwxr-xr-x 4 bosse bosse 4096 nov 30 08:43 dev
>>
>> As you can see it is a complete mess regarding the timestamps.
>>
>> I want the output to be like this instead:
>>
>> $ ls -l
>> total 100
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-04-26 11:05 Backups
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2021-02-05 11:47 bin
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-05-26 00:36 Desktop
>> drwxr-xr-x 4 bosse bosse 4096 2020-11-30 08:43 dev
>>
>> I also would like to be able to expand the time field to include
>> the seconds:
>>
>> $ ls -l
>> total 100
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-04-26 11:05:52 Backups
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2021-02-05 11:47:04 bin
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-05-26 00:36:15 Desktop
>> drwxr-xr-x 4 bosse bosse 4096 2020-11-30 08:43:17 dev
>>
>> How can this be done?
>>
>> I have tried to find a solution on-line but those are messing
>> with locales and such, whereas I want my Ubuntu machines to
>> always display the timestamps in ISO style as shown above. The
>> following does not cut it either:
>>
>> $ ls -l --time-style=iso
>> total 100
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-04-26  Backups
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 02-05 11:47 bin
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-05-26  Desktop
>> drwxr-xr-x 4 bosse bosse 4096 11-30 08:43 dev
>>
>> Here the year is missing on some entries while others do not
>> display the time, generally a big mess!
>>
>> And this is also bad since it seems to try to get time down to
>> nanoseconds and includes time zone settings too:
>>
>> $ ls -l --time-style=full-iso
>> total 100
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-04-26 11:05:52.359305731 +0200
>> Backups
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2021-02-05 11:47:35.821484127 +0100
>> bin
>> drwxr-xr-x 2 bosse bosse 4096 2020-05-26 00:36:15.372803793 +0200
>> Desktop
>> drwxr-xr-x 4 bosse bosse 4096 2020-11-30 08:43:29.437636415 +0100
>> dev
>>
>>
>> Please advice a setting I could but into .bashrc if needed to
>> solve the problem.
>
>
> alias ll="ls -l --time-style=full-iso | sed
> 's/^\(............................................\).................../\1/'
> "
>
> This needs to be on one line. The backslash in the first line is
> not to be removed.
>
> This won't work with arguments to the ls command. You could write
> a script or a bash function for that.

How about "--time-style=long-iso"?

If that's not good enough, you can specify your own style with
"--time-style=+...", where "+..." is a "date" like format.