Recently I rebuilt my primary workstation and was restoring files from backup. I have a few copies built up over time and was trying to determine which specific files I wanted to keep. The output of ls was cumbersome, sometimes listing the year and other times listing just the month and date.
The convention of the ls command is to only show the date when the timestamp of the file is more than six months away from the current date, but scanning this list was annoying as it swapped from an older file (Sep 29 2017) to newer files (Nov 23 20:53).
Of course there was a flag for ls to handle this…
This answer on https://unix.stackexchange.com was spot-on for what I was looking for:
In short the ls -l --time-style=long-iso flags keep the format consistent: 2021-08-22 12:00, 2020-12-16 05:04, or 2022-10-21 04:12
Viewing my backup archive directory now shows things consistently:
$ ls -al --time-style=long-iso
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 2 999 999 0 2022-11-13 14:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 2 999 999 0 2022-11-16 17:21 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 999 999 3478 2021-10-16 01:30 BackupToNAS.2021-10-16_0130.log
-rwxr-xr-x 1 999 999 4388 2021-10-16 01:30 BackupToNAS.2021-10-16_0130.log-scriptlog
-rwxr-xr-x 1 999 999 2986 2021-11-13 10:17 BackupToNAS.2021-11-13_1010.log
-rwxr-xr-x 1 999 999 4753 2021-11-13 10:17 BackupToNAS.2021-11-13_1010.log-scriptlog
drwxr-xr-x 2 999 999 0 2022-11-14 06:04 dan
drwxr-xr-x 2 999 999 0 2022-11-14 06:03 dan.old