Re: Text modes show military times. How do I change it to 12 hours format?

On 27/11/11 10:55, Ant wrote:
On 11/26/2011 11:53 PM PT, unruh typed:

$ w
19:43:27 up 2:23, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.03, 0.00
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
fool pts/0 192.168.1.5 17:52 0.00s 0.43s 0.00s w

top - 19:43:11 up 2:23, 1 user, load average: 0.08, 0.03, 0.01
Tasks: 206 total, 1 running, 205 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si,
0.0%st
Mem: 2060668k total, 733732k used, 1326936k free, 48064k buffers
Swap: 3905528k total, 0k used, 3905528k free, 399400k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1 root 20 0 8352 804 668 S 0 0.0 0:00.62 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
...

How do I change the times to 12 hours format instead of military for
easier readings in text modes with Terminals, SSH2, etc.? My GUI's
times/clocks show 12 hours format like in Gnome, GKrellM, etc. I cannot
seem to find the answer through Google search and man.

Do you mean the column TIME+? That is not "military time". That is
elapsed time
Do you mean logon time? That is 24 hour time (not Military-- it is used
as "civilian" time in most of the world) and is much easier to read
and work with than having to find that AM/PM.

No. w's 19:43:27 and time's 19:43:11.


You computer keeps time in seconds since epoch (00:00 Jan1 1970)
programs like top read it and interpret it and show it. It depends on
how they translate it. Ie, you will probably have to recompile top and
w to
get it to give you times in AM/PM

Oh. When did they start doing it? I just clean installed a brand new
Debian stable installation from Thanksgiving 2011 day to replace my old
2004's Debian. My old Debian and friend's new 64-bit Fedora didn't show
these military times. Or maybe I messed up during its installation with
UTC question since I didn't understand it.

It is not "military time" - it's called the 24 hour clock, and it's been in common use for civilian uses for over a hundred years in some countries. There are only a handful of old-fashioned countries that still cling to the inconvenient and often ambiguous 12 hour system.

The 12 hour system is fine for colloquial and verbal times, along with phrases like "first thing in the morning" - but it's daft for precise times such as times on a computer.

Having said that, there is always a choice in these things. Most programs use the locale setting to make such things configurable. So check your locale, and modify it if you really thing it is better than joining the 21st century.
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