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
other locale variables) may affect other programs as well, not just
Perl. In particular, external programs run from within Perl will see
these changes. If you make the new settings permanent (read on), all
-programs you run see the changes. See L<ENVIRONMENT> for for
+programs you run see the changes. See L<ENVIRONMENT> for
the full list of relevant environment variables and L<USING LOCALES>
for their effects in Perl. Effects in other programs are
easily deducible. For example, the variable LC_COLLATE may well affect
locale "En_US"--and in Cshish shells (B<csh>, B<tcsh>)
setenv LC_ALL en_US.ISO8859-1
-
+
If you do not know what shell you have, consult your local
helpdesk or the equivalent.
(prefix matches do not count and case usually counts) like "En_US"
without the quotes, then you should be okay because you are using a
locale name that should be installed and available in your system.
-In this case, see L<Permanently fixing system locale configuration>.
+In this case, see L<Permanently fixing your system's locale configuration>.
-=head2 Permanently fixing your locale configuration
+=head2 Permanently fixing your system's locale configuration
This is when you see something like:
a A b B c C d D e E
a b c d e A B C D E
-Here is a code snippet to tell what alphanumeric
+Here is a code snippet to tell what "word"
characters are in the current locale, in that locale's order:
use locale;
In the scope of S<C<use locale>>, Perl obeys the C<LC_CTYPE> locale
setting. This controls the application's notion of which characters are
alphabetic. This affects Perl's C<\w> regular expression metanotation,
-which stands for alphanumeric characters--that is, alphabetic and
-numeric characters. (Consult L<perlre> for more information about
+which stands for alphanumeric characters--that is, alphabetic,
+numeric, and including other special characters such as the underscore or
+hyphen. (Consult L<perlre> for more information about
regular expressions.) Thanks to C<LC_CTYPE>, depending on your locale
setting, characters like 'E<aelig>', 'E<eth>', 'E<szlig>', and
'E<oslash>' may be understood as C<\w> characters.
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
=item *
-If the decimal point character in the C<LC_NUMERIC> locale is
-surreptitiously changed from a dot to a comma, C<sprintf("%g",
-0.123456e3)> produces a string result of "123,456". Many people would
-interpret this as one hundred and twenty-three thousand, four hundred
-and fifty-six.
+Some systems are broken in that they allow the "C" locale to be
+overridden by users. If the decimal point character in the
+C<LC_NUMERIC> category of the "C" locale is surreptitiously changed
+from a dot to a comma, C<sprintf("%g", 0.123456e3)> produces a
+string result of "123,456". Many people would interpret this as
+one hundred and twenty-three thousand, four hundred and fifty-six.
=item *
expression match involving C<\w>, C<\W>, C<\s>, or C<\S>; or of
case-mapping with C<\l>, C<\L>,C<\u> or C<\U>.
-=item B<In-memory formatting function> (sprintf()):
-
-Result is tainted if C<use locale> is in effect.
-
=item B<Output formatting functions> (printf() and write()):
Success/failure result is never tainted.
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
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