Re: ls and character sets

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org>]

Oskar Liljeblad <osk@hem.passagen.se>:

> Not long ago I reported a wishlist-bug for ls (#56569) that
> there was no support for custom character sets. 
> The problem is that ls prints filenames with national characters
> like 'åäö' as '???'. I would like to do something like this:
> 
>   ls --character-set=ISO_8859-1
> 
> I was asked what these custom character sets do that locales
> don't.

You know about ls -N / ls --literal, do you?

I don't know whether ls uses the locale to determine which characters
are "nongraphic". It looks as though perhaps it doesn't ...

> So now I wonder: is there any locale that acts like the
> default locale, but with ISO-8859-1 character set support?
> Can I make one myself? Or is there another solution for the
> problem described above? I don't want to use a national
> locale, simply because I don't want to use special collation
> order, date format and stuff like that.

I've seen stuff like the following suggested:

export LANG=en.ISO_8859-1

(Choose English with iso-8859-1.)

export LC_CTYPE=de_DE

(Set just the ctype stuff to German, leaving the other locale aspects
as default.)

Edmund