On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 08:01:21PM +0700, Surachai Locharoen wrote:
I just want to know 'LANG=C' what does it mean? Normally, I see LANG is
set to laguage which exist in the real world such as en, th, fr.
The LANG variable sets the user's locale, which tells the system what
language and local conventions for things like time, money, numbers,
etc. the user prefers to use. The primary importance of this is to
tell the system what character set the user is using (and therefore
what characters the user can see on terminals, and such.)
Modern systems are moving to UTF-8 environments, which makes the
language part mostly irrelevant; it can display (almost) all
characters in all supported languages, regardless of what language the
user is using. However, ancient Unix systems used a locale of 'C',
which uses the character set US-ASCII, and sorts things (like
directory entries, for example) according to the ASCII sequence of
characters.
See the man page for locale in seciont 5 of the man pages for details:
$ man 5 locale