Re: Woody: make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 10:43:51PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> > 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.
>
Thanks for taking the time for your detailed answer. I understand more
than I did before, and the clouds are clearing up.
> > 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.
Yep, gaya comes before GAYA. Makes sense.
>
> > 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.
>
It seems sorting is fundamental to language support.
> 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
>
This has already explained quite a bit, thanks.
I guess all of this is related to the Debian package, localepurge. I
deployed it and got rid of quite a few locale files (about 80MB in freed
space). Hopefully, I didn't break anything.
-Andy
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