Difference in command line date format between XP & Windows 7

Question

The DATE command in XP gives the date in the format ddd dd/mm/yyyy e.g. Sun 12/12/2010. In Windows 7, it only gives dd/mm/yy I.e. 12/12/2010.
Both have the same regional settings.
Can Windows 7 be forced to display the date in the same way as XP, or can the day be extracted in the ddd format?

Answer 1

This is controlled by the "Short Date" setting under Control Panel → Region and Language → Format tab → Additional Settings → Date tab

Observe the results of date /t with short date set to "M/d/yyyy", then to "MM/dd/yyyy":

Answer 2

Found from this Stack Overflow answer, UnxUtils contains a date.exe which can take a specified format parameter.

date.exe +"%a %m/%d/%Y"
Mon 12/13/2010

UnxUtils contains a lot of other files, but I just confirmed you can just take date.exe and run it independently of everything else.

Note that you need to call it as date.exe or path\to\date and not just date, because otherwise the built-in shell command will run instead. Or, you can rename it to something like DateFormat.exe.

Answer 3

I have tested the date.exe app from UnxUtils & it has worked successfully so far in my test environment. I am about to implement it in one of my smaller client's environment & if that is successful, I will roll it out on all my clients sites. Thanks for the pointer to UnxUtils.