(solved) Re: INSTALLTIME:date format

[Joe Wulf]

I've figured it out, based on the clues you guys offered.

With additional research and troubleshooting, I found the "LANG=c" was sometimes conditionally being set; then the effective execution of:  rpm -q cobbler --qf "%{INSTALLTIME:date}\n" was giving me the exactly formatted result (of:  Tue Jan 31 14:43:27 2012) most times.  I fixed the script to:

LC_TIMEsave="${LC_TIME}";  LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
rpm -q cobbler --qf "%{INSTALLTIME:date}\n"
LC_TIME="${LC_TIMEsave}"; unset LC_TIMEsave

In all my tests so far, things are consistent the way I want them.

Thanks Greg and Jeff for the help!

R,
-Joe




>________________________________
> From: Greg Swift <gregswift at gmail.com>
>To: Joe Wulf <joe_wulf at yahoo.com>; General discussion about the RPM package manager <rpm-list at lists.rpm.org>; Jeffrey Johnson <n3npq at me.com> 
>Sent: Friday, April 6, 2012 9:30 AM
>Subject: Re: INSTALLTIME:date format
> 
>I know what Jeff says is right as well, but here is the output I was
>suggesting, and it shows the same thing, and is much simpler than
>reconfiguring your strftime.
>
>[root at penguin rhel]# rpm -q cobbler --qf "%{INSTALLTIME:date}\n"
>Tue 31 Jan 2012 02:43:27 PM EST
>[root at penguin rhel]# LANG=c rpm -q cobbler --qf "%{INSTALLTIME:date}\n"
>Tue Jan 31 14:43:27 2012
>
>I'd check the difference of your configured LANG on the two different
>sets of systems.  This affects other bits of the system, like sar's
>output.  The applications utilize the locally configured language's
>time format preference to present the time.
>
>-greg
>
>
>On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 22:57, Joe Wulf <joe_wulf at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Jeff,
>>
>> Thank you for the insight and direction.  I'll go explore the LC_TIME
>> issue.  I agree that is the right direction, from what you've said, and the
>> little I've read so far.
>>
>> My process is a casual one.  Once in a while, I'll kick off some scripts.
>> A part of that queries the RPM database for what is installed and provides a
>> structured formatted list back.  All the other data I can chop up as I need
>> to.  When that date format comes back different ways, it is challenging to
>> process consistently, since the returned data seems to vary so.  What I
>> think I need is a way to prefix my rpm query with a command that preserves
>> LC_TIME (or important aspects of it), set it temporarily for the duration of
>> that shell script instance to what I want and then puts LC_TIME back (if
>> necessary).  I'm not looking to change the whole system around, just to
>> support my occasional need.
>>
>> I'm going to start looking for a good understanding of locale and
>> specifically the parts and pieces of LC_TIME.
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> R,
>> -Joe
>>
>> P.S. resent to the list (I apologize for the duplicate).
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Jeffrey Johnson <n3npq at me.com>
>> To: Joe Wulf <joe_wulf at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: Greg Swift <gregswift at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Thursday, April 5, 2012 8:32 PM
>> Subject: Re: INSTALLTIME:date format
>>
>>
>> On Apr 5, 2012, at 8:28 PM, Greg Swift wrote:
>>
>> Try prefixing the command with LANG=c to see if that is causing the
>> discrepancy.
>>
>>
>> Right idea but wrong envvar (is my guess).
>>
>> strftime(3) is used to format dates (in a per-locale fashion).
>>
>> And "man 3 strftime" identifies LC_TIME as what you
>> want to change.
>>
>> I don't know what to change LC_TIME to, just that RPM uses strftime(3).
>>
>> hth
>>
>> 73 de Jeff
>>
>> On Apr 5, 2012 7:05 PM, "Joe Wulf" <joe_wulf at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> How does one refine or specify the format for the date returned by:
>> "%{INSTALLTIME:date}"?
>>
>> On some systems I get the first response (preferred) and for unknown reasons
>> I get the second on other systems:
>> -  "Fri 10 Jun 2011 02:03:18 PM GMT"
>> -  "Fri 10 June 02:03:18 2011"
>>
>> Is there some other, external (maybe posix thing) that affects this?
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
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