NAME

locale − Displays information about locales

SYNOPSIS

locale [−a | −m]

locale [−c] [−k] name...

STANDARDS

Interfaces documented on this reference page conform to industry standards as follows:

locale:  XCU5.0

Refer to the standards(5) reference page for more information about industry standards and associated tags. 

OPTIONS

−aWrites information about all available public locales. 

−cWrites the names of the specified locale categories. 

−kWrites the names and values of specified locale keywords. 

−mWrites the names of all character map (charmap) files that are available for specification to the −f option of the localedef command. 

OPERANDS

name...
Specifies one or more of the following:

       •A locale category, such as LC_TIME

       •A keyword, such as am_pm in a locale category

       •The reserved word charmap, which requests the name of the character map file used to produce the current locale

Different types of names can be intermixed in any order. However, if a single name represents both a locale category name and a keyword name in the current locale, results are undefined. 

DESCRIPTION

The locale command without any options or arguments writes to standard output the names and values of all the current locale environment variables, such as LANG and LC_COLLATE. 

The locale command with the −a or −m options displays information about available locales and character maps on your system. 

       •If the −a option is specified, locale writes the names of all available public locales. These are locales that are available to any application. 

       •If the −m option is specified, locale writes a list of the names of all available character-mapping files.  These values are suitable variable values for the −f option with the localedef command. 

The locale command with the name operand displays information about locale categories and keywords in the current locale. For example, the command could display information about the decimal_point keyword in the LC_NUMERIC category or information about all keywords in the LC_NUMERIC category.  The name operand can be either a locale category, a keyword from a category, or the keyword charmap. 

The following table shows how the −c and −k options determine the level of information displayed by the locale command with respect to locale keywords:

Following are the locale categories and the locale keywords that you can use in the name operand. Note that there are no keywords that you can specify in the locale command for the LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE categories; the XCU specification allows vendors to determine whether the locale command displays values for keywords in these two categories. 

EXIT STATUS

0 (zero)
Success.

>0An error occurred. 

ERRORS

[Tru64 UNIX]  To review locale diagnostic messages, enter the following command:

% dspcat /usr/lib/nls/msg/en_US.ISO8859-1/locale.cat | more

EXAMPLES

     1.Assume that the LANG environment variable is set to fr_FR.ISO8859-1 and the LC_MONETARY environment variable to fr_CA.ISO8859-1. The following example shows the results when you enter the locale command without options:

% locale
LANG=fr_FR.ISO8859-1
LC_COLLATE="fr_FR.ISO8859-1"
LC_CTYPE="fr_FR.ISO8859-1"
LC_MONETARY="fr_CA.ISO8859-1"
LC_NUMERIC="fr_FR.ISO8859-1"
LC_TIME="fr_FR.ISO8859-1"
LC_MESSAGES="fr_FR.ISO8859-1"
LC_ALL=

The LC_ALL variable, if set, overrides the values of other variables. For example, if LC_ALL is set to en_US.ISO8859-1, the setting implies LC_COLLATE=en_US.ISO8859-1, even if the LC_COLLATE environment variable is set to another locale. 

     2.The following commands show two ways to retrieve the value of the decimal_point delimiter for the current locale:

% locale -ck decimal_point
LC_NUMERIC
decimal_point="."
% locale decimal_point
.

     3.In the following example, the locale command retrieves any keywords defined in the CHARMAP, LC_CTYPE, and LC_COLLATE categories of the POSIX (C) locale:

% locale -ck CHARMAP LC_CTYPE LC_COLLATE
CHARMAP
charmap="ISO8859-1"
code_set_name="ISO8859-1"
mb_cur_max=1
mb_cur_min=1
LC_COLLATE
LC_CTYPE
alnum=0x0002
alpha=0x0001
blank=0x0004
cntrl=0x0008
digit=0x0010
graph=0x0020
lower=0x0040
print=0x0080
punct=0x0100
space=0x0200
upper=0x0400
xdigit=0x0800

     4.The following example shows a possible application of the locale and printf commands in a script to determine whether a user response is affirmative:

if printf "%s\n" "$response" | grep -Eq "’locale yesexpr’"
then
        <insert processing for affirmative response>
else
        <insert processing for response other than affirmative>
fi

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

The following environment variables affect the behavior of the locale command:

LANG
Provides a default value for the locale category variables that are not set or null.

LC_ALL
If set, overrides the values of all locale variables, including LANG. 

LC_CTYPE
Determines the locale for the interpretation of byte sequences as characters (single-byte or multibyte) in input operands and files.

LC_MESSAGES
Determines the locale used to find the message catalog for diagnostic messages and other text displayed by the command.

NLSPATH
Determines the location of message catalogs for processing of LC_MESSAGES. 

SEE ALSO

Commands:  localedef(1), printf(1)

Functions:  setlocale(3)

Files:  locale(4)

Others:  i18n_intro(5), l10n_intro(5), standards(5)

Writing Software for the International Market