Change Clock Format on Raspberry Pi Raspbian OS

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You might have noticed that by default when you load your Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian OS for the first time that the clock displays time in a 24-hour clock format. As majority of us are used to the 12-hour format, it’s something that we should all change.

You can change the Raspbian clock format using the GUI or Terminal.

Change the Clock Format Using Raspbian’s Desktop GUI

Enter the following string for a 12-hour clock:

%I:%M %p

Your Raspberry Pi Digital Clock window should look like this screenshot:

Change Clock Format Using Terminal

The way your system displays the clock format is stored within a configuration file, located here: /home/pi/.config/lxpanel/LXDE-pi/panels/panel.

  1. To edit this file, Open Terminal application. You can use any text editors to edit the file. In our example below, we’ll be using nano edit.
  2. Save the configuration
.config/lxpanel/LXDE-pi/panels/panel