During one of my many Linux reconfiguration, I wondered if there was a way for me to make it show the date and time by following the ISO 8601 standard. If you don’t know, that is the standard defining the date format as 2018-08-07 (and other things, like 24-hour format, etc.).

The way you configure these kinds of things in Linux is via the locale system. Most of the time, we just configure the LANG variable to match our own language (like LANG=en_US.UTF-8) and stop the configuration there. But there are more variable than that (like LC_NUMERIC, LC_MONETARY, LC_PAPER to name a few), and the one that interests us today is LC_TIME.

It turns out that there is an en_DK locale (which is really a haked locale, since English is not a language of Denmark), that follow the ISO 8601 standard!

So you can set up your time locale using LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 and reach datetime nirvana 🙏