Date and time issues (Was: 24 hour time in Thunderbird)

[Ingemar Nilsson]

Hi.

After reading the thread about 24 hour time in Thunderbird, I decided to
make some experiments with date and time formats. I have wished for a long
time to set the date format to use ISO-8601 and to use a 24 hour clock, but
how to do this hasn't been obvious.

I started by running Thunderbird with LC_TIME set to sv_SE.utf8, and sure,
it showed date and time in the expected format. I then figured I'd check
'ls -l'. I was (very) surprised to see that ls -l now gives the date in
ISO-8601 format, even though my LANG has the value
'en_US.UTF-8'. Substituting US for UK changed to the traditional format.

Why does LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 give american date/time format in Thunderbird,
but ISO-8601 format in 'ls -l'? And the same applies to sv_SE.UTF-8, which
gives ISO-8601 format in Thunderbird, but another format in 'ls -l'. I'm
really lost here.

This computer runs Fedora 7 with all updates up to today's batch. My
physical locale is Sweden, with a Swedish keyboard, but my system language
is English (which I wish to keep).

$ env | egrep '(LANG|LC)'
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Regards
Ingemar