listing files with ISO 8601 time stamps on *n*x flavours
Posted by jpluimers on 2018/12/05
A (long!) while ago, I wrote about list date with seconds from ls command – Dev Shed that showed how to list the full ISO timestamp (including seconds) of files.
This is an update.
The previous post showed that you could use this statement to list all files with their full ISO timestamps (and therefore get both the seconds and milliseconds) on (open)SuSE Linux, Mac OS X and Cygwin:
ls -l --time-style=full-iso
What Linux and displaying dates in ISO 8601 format… : Little Green Delusions proposes are two solutions to make this more permanent:
alias ls='ls -l --time-style=long-iso'
or edit one of your profile files (he prefers /etc/profile.local, but that is system wide, so I usually prefer ~/.bash_profile) to add this line:
export TIME_STYLE=long-iso
The thing is: I do not always want to have ls -l show ISO 8601 dates. I like the way that ls-l lists timestamps for very old or future files:
If the modification time of the file is more than 6 months in the past or future, then the year of the last modification is displayed in place of the hour and minute fields.
Besides, some – but not all – flavours of nx also allow some more specific ways of showing iso timestamps:
- `ls -l -T` on Mac OS X
- `ls -l -E` (full) or `ls -l -e`(long) on Solaris
- `ls –full-time` on openSuSE
But I want to have it work the same at least on these flavours:
- SuSE Linux
- Mac OS X
- Cygwin
So to make things more universal I’ve added these to my ~./bash_profile:
alias ls-8601='ls -l --time-style=long-iso'
alias ls-full-8601='ls -l --time-style=full-iso'
So now I can choose which format to use when.
Summary
There are various ways of showing time stamps:
- regular
- long-iso
- full-iso
Depending on your nx flavour, there are different arguments to use each of them, but using time-style is common.
Setting some aliases makes it work the same everywhere.
–jeroen
via: list date with seconds from ls command – Dev Shed.
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