locale(M)                       19 June 1992                       locale(M)


 Name

    locale - the international locale

 Syntax

    language [  [ territory ] [ .  [ codeset ] ] ]

    "C"

 Description

    The international locale is a definition of the local conventions to be
    used by UNIX libraries (and hence utilities and applications) for fea-
    tures whose behavior varies internationally.

    The locale is specified by a character string of the form:

       languageterritory.codeset

    where:

       language    represents both the language of text files being used, and
                   the preferred language for messages (where the utility or
                   application is capable of displaying messages in many lan-
                   guages),

       territory   represents the geographical location (usually the country)
                   determining such factors as currency and numeric formats,
                   and

       codeset     represents the character set in use for the internal
                   representation of text.

    The locale string ``french_canada.8859'' could therefore represent a
    Canadian user using the French language, processing data using the ISO
    8859/1 standard international character set.

    Each element (language, territory or codeset) can be up to 14 characters
    long, and should use only alphanumeric ASCII characters (see ascii(M)).

    Note that the locale is not required to be completely specified:  terri-
    tory and codeset are optional.  When a locale is incompletely specified,
    missing values are sought in the following sequence:

    1. For each subclass, such as LCTIME, in an environment variable of the
       same name as the subclass.

    2. In the LANG environment variable.

    3. In the file /etc/default/lang.

    The special locale string ``C'', used to represent the minimal environ-
    ment needed for the C programming language, is taken to be equivalent to
    ``english_us.ascii''.

    The format of the file /etc/default/lang is at least one line, of the
    form:

       LANG="language_territory.codeset"

    A partly specified locale string will be expanded to the first LANG=
    entry in which the specified locale fields match.

    Thus if the /etc/default/lang file contains the following:

       LANG=english_us.ascii
       LANG=english_uk.8859
       LANG=french_france.8859

    A locale string ``english_uk'' will get expanded to ``english_uk.8859'',
    whereas a locale string ``french'' will get expanded to
    ``french_france.8859''.

    The information used to configure a particular locale is generated by the
    utilities chrtbl(M), coltbl(M), mestbl(M), montbl(M), numtbl(M) and
    timtbl(M).  The output files produced by these utilities (ctype, collate,
    currency, messages, numeric and time respectively) must be installed in
    the correct place in the directory structure /usr/lib/lang.  The correct
    directory name is found by substituting the language, territory and
    codeset names into the string
    ``/usr/lib/lang/language/territory/codeset''.  The files should be
    installed into this directory with their existing file name (such as
    ctype).

    A suggested naming convention for locales is as follows:

       language  The name of the language, in English, such as:  english,
                 french, german.

       territory The name of the nation, in English, such as:  us, uk,
                 canada, france, germany, switzerland.

       codeset   An identification of the codeset, such as:  ascii, 8859.

 See also

    chrtbl(M), coltbl(M), environ(M), mestbl(M), montbl(M), numtbl(M),
    setlocale(S), timtbl(M)

 Value added

    locale is an extension of AT&T System V provided by The Santa Cruz Opera-
    tion, Inc.