date ignores locale when parsing short dates

[Adam Nielsen]

Hi all,

I've encountered a small issue with the way the date utility parses
textual dates.  It seems to ignore the locale settings and assume US
date formats, and I'm not sure how to get it to respect the local date
format.

For example:

  # Correct behaviour, US is dd-mm-yy
  $ LC_TIME="en_US" date +%Y-%m-%d -d 1/2/03
  2003-01-02

  # Incorrect, locale says short dates are dd-mm-yy
  $ LC_TIME="en_AU" date +%Y-%m-%d -d 1/2/03
  2003-01-02
  # Should be 2003-02-01

The locale itself seems good:

  $ LC_TIME="en_AU" date +%x -d 2003-02-01
  01/02/03

Am I doing something wrong?  I've read that -d uses the "POSIX locale"
rather than the user locale - if so, is there a way to get date's fancy
processing with mm/dd swapped to dd/mm, without resorting to regexes?

Many thanks,
Adam.