What does C in LC_ALL=C mean?
Solution 1
The only solid hint I could was from some Slackware documentation written by the great Patrick Volkerding. In the file /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
he has made the following comment:
# 'C' is the old Slackware (and UNIX) default, which is 127-bit ASCII
# with a charmap setting of ANSI_X3.4-1968. These days, it's better to
# use en_US.UTF-8 or another modern $LANG setting (or at least en_US)
# to support extended character sets.
#export LANG=C
Without giving away what the 'C' actually stands for, but I would guess that 'C' is an alias for this very lowest and safest level of locale.... Not very satisfactory I know :(.
To see this comment for yourself in the Slackware package try the following:
wget http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-14.2/source/a/etc/_etc.tar.gz
tar -zxvf _etc.tar.gz etc/profile.d/lang.sh.new --strip-components 2
And then open the file lang.sh.new
with your favoured text editor...
Solution 2
C
stands for the C programming language. It is a synonym for the POSIX
locale.
See http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap07.html#tag_07_02
The POSIX locale can be specified by assigning to the appropriate environment variables the values "C" or "POSIX".
Related videos on Youtube
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
-
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy over 1 year
I know very well that to override locale settings we can use
LC_ALL
prepended to the command one wants to run. I also knowC
uses default locale of a system. But what doesC
stand for ? -
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy almost 8 yearsOK , so . . . .what part of that link am I supposed to read ? Edit your post please to actually cite that link properly
-
user.dz almost 8 yearsSame thinking, but may be due to the 1st implementation of
gettext
was in C language. Also not for "default locale of a system" but actually "default locale of each application". The developer can use different original/source locale thanen_US
oren
. It could be Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese... it doesn't matter.