Re: Woody: make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct

[bob@proulx.com (Bob Proulx)]

> Just a quick question on a related matter. I have been using this
> machine for a while now. $LANG was always set to C.

C is the same as POSIX and the same as unset which is to say you get
traditional sort order.  Things are sorted like US-ASCII which is
[A-Z] before [a-z] and the like.  Setting to en_US and other overrides
the default behavior and changes the sort ordering, among other
things.

> I installed the locales package and reconfigured to en_US. What
> exactly does this do for me?

Everything that sorts such as the sort command, ls, /bin/bash when
doing glob expansion, etc. literally everything will now sort in
dictionary order.  Like [AaBbCcDd] and so on.

Check out the differences between these two commands on different
directories.

  LC_ALL=POSIX ls -a

  LC_ALL=en_US ls -a

Assuming that you have en_US installed then you will find that things
are now sorting in dictionary order instead of us-ascii order.  That
is, Makefile is next to makefile, Aligator is next to aardvark, for
example.

> Could somebody please explain how locales work? Is it specific to Linux?
> Specific to Debian? 

Locales are tables which configure the strcoll() library routine which
applications call when sorting.  Do a 'man strcoll' to start that
documentation trail.  If you have different tables then you can
support say chinese sort order which can make native language support
possible.  Prior to locales everything was in us-ascii and if you did
not speak english you were out of luck.

I can't help too much but if you want to see how commands react to it
you can check out the online standards documentation for a command
such as sort.

  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/sort.html

Bob


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