At the moment, the only way to have full control of the way dates, time, numbers, weeks, currency and other variables are formatted is to go into /usr/share/i18n/locales/ and edit locale files.

In the process, you may even have to convert numbers into Unicode, if your desired format doesn't fit a particular country locale.

It's so complicated that people have felt compelled to write HowTos for it, such as this one, which is actually quite good: http://ccollins.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/how-to-change-date-formats-on-ubuntu/

There are many reasons for this state of things, many of them quite logical and correct for the time they were decided upon, but a modern OS can't rely on legacy cumbersome methods to perform simple user tasks.

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