Xfce Forum

rolgiati

Member

From: Asuncion, Paraguay

Registered: 2013-06-08

Posts: 37

How can I change the date format that appears in Pcmanfm ?

I am cursed with dates that appear in US format;
tried to modify /etc/locale.conf and /etc/locales.gen, #commenting all US lines and uncommenting some lines gor GB and FR, no change.

Running XFCE under PCLinuxOS.

Any help gratefully received

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eriefisher

Wanderer

From: ON, Canada

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 988

Re: How can I change the date format that appears in Pcmanfm ?

Have you actually set up your locale? PCLinuxOS has a tool for this I believe.

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annoyedanchor

Member

Registered: 2026-03-02

Posts: 1

Re: How can I change the date format that appears in Pcmanfm ?

On XFCE, changing /etc/locale. conf alone often isn’t enough. Try opening Settings → Language Support (or set it via localectl) and make sure your Formats are set to en_GB instead of en_US, then log out and back in. You can also check echo $LANG and echo $LC_TIME in a terminal to see which locale is actually being used.

carthal

Member

From: Charleston

Registered: 2026-07-15

Posts: 1

Re: How can I change the date format that appears in Pcmanfm ?

If changing /etc/locale.conf didn't make any difference, there's a good chance the issue isn't with the system locale itself.

bggf

Member

Registered: 2026-04-13

Posts: 35

Re: How can I change the date format that appears in Pcmanfm ?

According to this post:
https://knoppix.net/forum/threads/31302 … te-Formats
PCmanfm uses the locale to set the date.

If you just want to change the locale only for this program use one of the two solutions in :
https://askubuntu.com/questions/144968/ … sktop-file
To set the variable. (one is to modify the desktop environment directly,this can be overwritten by re-install or update, so you will have to manage that, the other is creating an alias (function actually) in your startup bashrc file.

Troubleshooting:
To make sure that you have the correct environment for the program you can check the process environment by getting it's process id:
ps -ef|grep -i pcmanfm
and read the process id, then search for it in the /proc folder. One of the files should give you the environment variables used for that process (I don't remember which one and don't have a linux machine available right now.)