This is really one of the imperfections of the FTP standard: the exact date format was not specified in the original protocol specification. However, usually the client expects POSIX default behaviour, which can be arranged easily enough.
Your ftpd has inherited its locale environment variable settings from somewhere. Was it (re)started manually after a system boot? If so, the setting may have come from the session of the sysadmin that started it.
You need to set the LC_ALL environment variable for ftpd to explicitly override all locale definitions and force the POSIX standard behaviour in all language-related matters.
This setting is:
export LC_ALL="C"
See "man 5 environ", "man 5 lang" and "man locale" for more information.
Is your ftpd configured to run stand-alone or by inetd? (If stand-alone, the ftpd process is always running; if by inetd, only when someone has established a FTP connection.)
If your ftpd is started by inetd (the default set-up on HP-UX), you should place the locale setting (above) in the beginning of the /sbin/init.d/inetd script.
Then stop & restart inetd. All new ftpd processes should inherit the new setting from inetd.
If your ftpd runs stand-alone (e.g. the optional wu-ftpd from HP), place the locale setting in the beginning of the ftpd startup script, then stop and restart your ftpd.
MK
MK
