uutils / uutils/coreutils

date does not always honor i18n environment variables correctly (POSIX)

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U - date
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Rust
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Description

revision: 01c8d6e207760cf72f684999f7b030b63f7e0c60

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/date.html

This issue is similar to #11136 (sort).

(
# discrepancy
export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
unset LC_ALL
export LC_TIME=

gnudate
# 2026年  3月 12日 木曜日 11:57:42 JST
./target/debug/date
# 2026年 Mar 12日 Thursday 11:57:42 JST
)

(
# works as expected (but leading space to month is trimmed)
unset LANG
export LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8
unset LC_TIME

gnudate
# 2026年  3月 12日 木曜日 11:57:42 JST
./target/debug/date
# 2026年 3月 12日 木曜日 11:57:42 JST
)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the two POSIX locale cases using gnu date and ./target/debug/date, then read the POSIX date specification linked in the issue. Trace the date command's locale environment handling and make its output match the GNU examples, including LC_TIME precedence and localized weekday and month names.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli, internationalization
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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