/etc/environment
Hi,
I was having trouble with the display of special characters in mutt when
logged in using ssh, and I found that the LANG environment variable is
the culprit.
When I use mutt from an xterm, special characters like ë, é, § for
example are displayed correctly. However, after doing ssh localhost from
that xterm, special characters are displayed as '?'. diff-ing the
environment settings showed that from a normal xterm, LANG is unset,
while from a login shell (e.g. when using ssh) LANG is set to C,
whatever that means.
The only place I found LANG=C appeared to be /etc/environment, and
changing this to LANG='' appears to have solved the problem.
But several questions remain:
Why doesn't display of special characters work when LANG is set to a
value?
When is /etc/environment parsed? I tried su - and xterm -ls, and LANG is
not set. But when I login from the console or with ssh or telnet, it is.
Why is LANG set to C from /etc/environment; which package puts this in?
And what does LANG=C mean to programs in general?
Any pointers appreciated,
Wouter
Reply to: