Use a "sane" date format in terminal and applications

.bash_profile

# Use a "sane" date format in terminal and applications
# Jeremy Bryan Smith <[email protected]>

# The following environment variables can be set in your terminal's profile config file.
# For BASH this typically is ~/.bash_profile for your user or /etc/profile for system-wide.

# What is a "sane" date format?
# * I consider a "sane" date format a format that:
#   * Uses 24-hour time format instead of the AM/PM nonsense.
#   * Begins with the most significant number and ends with the least significant number.
#   * Has a consistent width (e.g. all numbers that can consist of multiple digits are
#     zero-padded so that they contain the maximum possible number of digits).
#     For example, in this order: Year, month, day, hour, minute, second
#     And zero padded, such as: 2019-08-12 09:36
#     Example: ISO 8601 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>
#  * Yes, I am aware that once the year moves from 9999 to 10000 this will break.
#    When that time comes, I'm sure the ISO standard and strftime() will be updated.
#  * Don't even get me started on time zones... ugh!

# Why use a "sane" date format?
# * So that all text in a table or file listing lines up.
# * So that the date is string sortable.
#
#   Consider this terrible listing:
#   12/9/2019 9:21:06 PM
#   3/12/2013 10:03:59 AM
#   1/1/2020 1:31:00 AM
#
#   That is a horrendous eye sore! And you can not string sort!
#   Many applications may not be aware of a table column's data type and will not be
#   able to sort a table by the date with this terrible format.
#
#   However, consider the same dates above, but sanely formatted:
#   2019-09-12 21:21:06
#   2013-12-03 10:03:59
#   2020-01-01 01:31:00
#
#   Ahh, much better :-)

# * What can you, as an application developer, do to help?
#   * Never hard-code date formats. Anywhere. Ever. At least use the system
#     locale's format, and ideally, allow the user to configure the format.
#   * Submit patches for poor applications that don't follow this rule.

# Use US English variant of UTF-8 character encoding
export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
export LANG=en_US.utf8

# ...Except for the time format: Use ISO 8601 style (courtesey of the Danes)
export LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8

# Use an ISO 8601 style date format for the 'ls' command
alias 'ls=ls --time-style "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z"  --color=auto'