I have a personal shell script that for reasons beyond the scope of this entry uses the Unix date command to determine the current day, month, and year. Recently I noticed that the shell script was sometimes not working right on our Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 servers, but was working right on 18.04, and tracked it down to the fact that doing 'ssh server date' produced output in a different format on 18.04 than on the other two.

; ssh server1804 date
Sat May  7 20:56:00 EDT 2022
; ssh server2204 date
Sat May  7 08:56:00 PM EDT 2022

If I actually logged in to a 20.04 or 22.04 system and set up my normal environment, the date output reverted to the 18.04 traditional Unix format. Obviously this is some Unix (Linux) locale fun and games.

My first instinct was to spend time figuring out what magic environment variable or system setting was different between the machines, so I could get the date format to come out right, so my script could parse it properly again. Then I metaphorically bopped myself on the forehead, because why was I even parsing the default output of date at all. Date has supported specifying the output format for a long time, so if what I wanted was the day, the month, and the year, I should just change the script to have date output only and exactly that:

dout="$(date +'%e %b %Y')"

Figuring out what's wrong with locales (or anything else) can be fun and interesting, but sometimes the right answer is to go around the problem entirely. I probably should remember and apply this more often than I do.

(Of course I could go one step further to just run date three times, once for each of the day, the month, and the year. But I reflexively twitch at things like that, even if it will never matter for this particular personal script.)

PS: The hard to believe reason that this script didn't use a date format from the start is that it's old enough to predate versions of date that supported this. It actually hasn't changed all that much from the oldest-dated version I could easily find in my collection of stuff.