ls /usr/lib/nls
+ ls /usr/share/locale
+
and see whether they list something resembling these
en_US.ISO8859-1 de_DE.ISO8859-1 ru_RU.ISO8859-5
english.iso88591 german.iso88591 russian.iso88595
english.roman8 russian.koi8r
-Sadly, even though the calling interface for setlocale() has
-been standardized, names of locales and the directories where the
+Sadly, even though the calling interface for setlocale() has been
+standardized, names of locales and the directories where the
configuration resides have not been. The basic form of the name is
-I<language_country/territory>B<.>I<codeset>, but the latter parts after
-I<language> are not always present. The I<language> and I<country> are
-usually from the standards B<ISO 3166> and B<ISO 639>, the two-letter
-abbreviations for the countries and the languages of the world,
-respectively. The I<codeset> part often mentions some B<ISO 8859>
-character set, the Latin codesets. For example, C<ISO 8859-1> is the
-so-called "Western codeset" that can be used to encode most Western
-European languages. Again, there are several ways to write even the
-name of that one standard. Lamentably.
+I<language_territory>B<.>I<codeset>, but the latter parts after
+I<language> are not always present. The I<language> and I<country>
+are usually from the standards B<ISO 3166> and B<ISO 639>, the
+two-letter abbreviations for the countries and the languages of the
+world, respectively. The I<codeset> part often mentions some B<ISO
+8859> character set, the Latin codesets. For example, C<ISO 8859-1>
+is the so-called "Western European codeset" that can be used to encode
+most Western European languages adequately. Again, there are several
+ways to write even the name of that one standard. Lamentably.
Two special locales are worth particular mention: "C" and "POSIX".
Currently these are effectively the same locale: the difference is
The remaining locale category, C<LC_MESSAGES> (possibly supplemented
by others in particular implementations) is not currently used by
-Perl--except possibly to affect the behavior of library functions called
-by extensions outside the standard Perl distribution.
+Perl--except possibly to affect the behavior of library functions
+called by extensions outside the standard Perl distribution and by the
+operating system and its utilities. Note especially that the string
+value of C<$!> and the error messages given by external utilities may
+be changed by C<LC_MESSAGES>. If you want to have portable error
+codes, use C<%!>. See L<Errno>.
=head1 SECURITY
C<LC_ALL> is the "override-all" locale environment variable. If
set, it overrides all the rest of the locale environment variables.
+=item LANGUAGE
+
+B<NOTE>: C<LANGUAGE> is a GNU extension, it affects you only if you
+are using the GNU libc. This is the case if you are using e.g. Linux.
+If you are using "commercial" UNIXes you are most probably I<not>
+using GNU libc and you can ignore C<LANGUAGE>.
+
+However, in the case you are using C<LANGUAGE>: it affects the
+language of informational, warning, and error messages output by
+commands (in other words, it's like C<LC_MESSAGES>) but it has higher
+priority than L<LC_ALL>. Moreover, it's not a single value but
+instead a "path" (":"-separated list) of I<languages> (not locales).
+See the GNU C<gettext> library documentation for more information.
+
=item LC_CTYPE
In the absence of C<LC_ALL>, C<LC_CTYPE> chooses the character type