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Gigi
Asked: 2019-11-08 11:38:31 +0800 CST

How do I change the date language in the terminal?

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if I do an ls -l, I get output such as the following:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        93584 Apr 21  2017  zipsplit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        26624 Ott  5  2018  zjsdecode
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root         2206 Aww 23 11:24  zless
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root         1842 Aww 23 11:24  zmore
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root         4553 Aww 23 11:24  znew

See where the date is... how do I change that to English?

I'm using Konsole on Kubuntu.

Edit: Output of locale as requested:

daniel@cassiopeia:~$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_TIME=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_NAME=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=mt_MT.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

There is clearly a mixture of US-English and Maltese in there. How do I get rid of the Maltese and just keep English? Or, say, change it to UK English?

kubuntu language konsole

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm assuming, from another question by you, that you're using Kubuntu 19.10. (This is somewhat important because some settings move around from one version to another.)

    In Kubuntu 19.10 with the kubuntu-backports ppa installed, I'm on

    Operating System: Kubuntu 19.10
    KDE Plasma Version: 5.17.2
    KDE Frameworks Version: 5.62.0
    Qt Version: 5.12.4

    In this system, open System Settings > Regional Settings, and click on the Formats icon in the left panel. In the image below, I chose a time format setting for Malta from the dropdown next to Time, logged out and logged in again. On opening konsole, I see this

    Time format setting for Malta

    To change to something else, I just go through the process again, log out and log back in:

    Time format setting for UK

    One point to note is that just because you see something in the dropdown (in System Settings > Regional Settings) and can apparently choose it, that doesn't mean it's actually available.

    To get mt_MT.utf8 on my system, I had to "uncomment" the relevant entry in /etc/locale.gen and then run sudo locale-gen.

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  2. As rinzwind commented, you can change locale for the Whole terminal use.
    As I guess, you just want to change the language for one command, sometimes only.

    In that case, simply 'prefix' the command with a variable. It is command expansion.
    See the bash manual : https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/bash/manual/bash.html#Simple-Command-Expansion

    $ LANG=en_US.utf8 ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        93584 Apr 21  2017  zipsplit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        26624 Oct  5  2018  zjsdecode
(...)

$ LANG=en_US.utf8 gnome-control-center
# will start the gui with english language

$ GZIP=-9 tar cvzf /path/to/archive myarchive.tar.gz
# This will set max compression level (9) for gzip option in tar command

    You can also create some aliases in your .bashrc in order to change locale language quickly : 

    # inside .bashrc
alias langen='LANG=en_US.utf8'
alias langne='LANG=ne_NP UTF-8'

# Then in a terminal
$ langen
$ ls -l
# get an output in  english
# then switch back to your preferred language
$ langne

    Get enabled locales (installed locale languages) codes with locale -a.
    Get avaiable locales with cat /etc/locale.gen
    Enable a new one with sudo locale-gen ne_NP UTF-8

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