Re: What does it mean 'LANG=C'
On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 09:36:59AM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
> 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;
Still very relevant, because it is used to tell the application which
language to use when printing messages. Applications written by
unilingual programmers usually ignore this, but things like OpenOffice
are capable of reacting to it significantly.
> 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
>
> --
> Derek D. Martin
> http://www.pizzashack.org/
> GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
>
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