Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

Name

locale

Synopsis

                  locale [options] [name]

Print report on current locale settings. Locales determine the country-specific settings for a system, including character encodings, the formatting of dates, honorifics, diagnostic messages, currency, printer paper sizes, and default measurements. Locale settings are essentially a dictionary of settings specified by keyword. The keywords are grouped together into related categories whose names begin with LC_. Each category has a related environment variable of the same name from which it will read its locale setting. Supply keyword or category names as name to examine their values. Multiple names may be given. You can also use the special keyword charmap to see the current character mapping. When executed with no arguments, locale prints the value of all locale-related environment variables.

Options

-a

Print all available locale settings installed on the system.

-c

Print the category related to each name argument.

-k

Print keywords along with their settings for each name argument.

-m

Print all available character maps.

Environment variables

LANG

The default value for unset internationalization variables. If not set, the system’s default value is used.

LC_ADDRESS

Postal settings, country, and language names and abbreviation.

LC_COLLATE

String and character sorting and comparison settings.

LC_CTYPE

Character attributes, including case conversion mappings, and categories of characters (whitespace, digit, lower, upper, punctuation, etc.).