Get ls to always show the modified time in hours/minutes

How can I get the ls command to show an exact time?

4 Answers

Might depend on your distro, but this argument for ls is available in Debian:

--time-style=STYLE with -l, show times using style STYLE: full-iso, long-iso, iso, locale, +FORMAT. FORMAT is interpreted like `date'; if FORMAT is FORMAT1<newline>FORMAT2, FORMAT1 applies to non-recent files and FORMAT2 to recent files; if STYLE is prefixed with `posix-', STYLE takes effect only outside the POSIX locale

try

man ls 

from your command line

2

As well as CaseyIT's solution, you can also use the --full-time option.

Your locale will affect the way ls displays that date and time.

My locale is en_US.UTF-8 and ls always displays hours and minutes when I use ls -l, for example. However, if I change my locale like this:

LC_TIME=C ls -l

files that are newer than six months old don't show a year, older than six months or are in the future don't display a time at all and do show the year. The C locale (aka the POSIX locale) reproduces the historical behavior of ls in this regard (I seem to recall that there were some additional subtleties, however).

In FreeBSD the -T flag does this

ls -alFT

-rwxrwxr-x 1 un un 4900 May 5 10:52:03 2013 custom-banner.js*

1

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