Re: Question regarding ls output for Japanese locale (missing "day" Kanji)

[Pádraig Brady]

On 02/06/2021 08:39, henkelman77@yahoo.co.jp wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I see an unexpected result when listing files with GNU ls and Japanese locale.
> The Japanese character for day (日) is missing.
>
> Expected result - same as UNIX (Solaris 10 for example):
> -bash-3.2$ LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 ls -ld /etc
> drwxr-xr-x  81 root     sys         5120  5月 24日  15:19 /etc
>
> Actual result:
>
> Solaris with gnu ls provided by csw
> -bash-3.2$ /opt/csw/bin/gls --version
> ls (GNU coreutils) 8.22
> -bash-3.2$ LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 /opt/csw/bin/gls -ld /etc
> drwxr-xr-x 81 root sys 5120  5月 24 15:19 /etc
>
>
> Same for Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 - ls (GNU coreutils) 8.30 )
> > LANG=ja_JP.utf8 ls -ld /etc
> drwxr-xr-x 139 root root 12288  5月 29 06:17 /etc
>
>
> The same seems to apply for Chinese as well:
> > LANG=zh_TW.utf8 ls -ld /etc
> drwxr-xr-x. 107 root root 8192  5月 28 20:29 /etc
>
> > LANG=zh_CN.utf8 ls -ld /etc
> drwxr-xr-x. 107 root root 8192 5月  28 20:29 /etc
>
>
> It seems strange to me, because the character for month (月) is printed, but the 
> one for day (日) is missing.
>
> ​Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

This is a result of the locale setup of the system.
On Linux at least you can see the available time/date settings with:
  LC_ALL=ja_JP.utf8 locale -kc LC_TIME

That shows there is no way to lookup the format you desire in a generic way on 
Linux.

ls does give you quite a bit of control over the date/time display though.
You could have a 日本語 specific setting using:

  export TIME_STYLE=$'+%b %e日  %Y\n%b %e日 %H:%M'

Then `ls -l` should display as you expect.

cheers,
Pádraig