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Locale System
What are locales?
A locale is a set of information that most programs use for determining country and language specific settings. The locales and their data are part of the system library and can be found at /usr/share/i18n/locales/ on most systems. A locale name is generally named ab_CD where ab is the two (or three) letter language code (as specified in ISO-639) and CD is the two letter country code (as specified in ISO-3166). Variants like @euro or @latin are often appended to locale names, e.g. de_DE@euro or nan_TW@latin.
Environment variables for locales
LANG- Defines all locale settings at once, while allowing further individual customization via the LC_* settings below.
LC_COLLATE- Define alphabetical ordering of strings. This affects e.g. output of sorted directory listings.
LC_CTYPE- Define the character-handling properties for the system. This determines which characters are seen as alphabetic, numeric, and so on. This also determines the character set used, if applicable.
LC_MESSAGES- Programs' localizations stored in /usr/share/locale/ for applications that use a message-based localization scheme (the majority of GNU programs).
LC_MONETARY- Defines currency units and formatting of currency-type numeric values.
LC_NUMERIC- Defines formatting of numeric values which aren't monetary. Affects things such as thousand separator and decimal separator.
LC_TIME- Defines formatting of dates and times.
LC_PAPER- Defines default paper size.
LC_ALL- Overrides all other settings.