LOCALE(M)                XENIX System V                 LOCALE(M)



     Name
          locale - International locale.

     Syntax
          language [ _ [ territory ] [ . [ codeset ] ] ]
          "C"

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

          The locale is specified by a character string of the form
          language_territory.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 languages),

          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:  territory and codeset are optional.  When a
          locale is incompletely specified, missing values are sought
          in the following sequence:

          1. For each subclass, such as LC_TIME , 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 environment needed for the C programming language,
          is taken to be equivalent to ``english_us.ascii''.



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     LOCALE(M)                XENIX System V                 LOCALE(M)



          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)







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