LOCALE(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual LOCALE(1)
NAME
locale - character encoding and localization conventions
SYNOPSIS
locale [-a | -m | charmap]
DESCRIPTION
If the locale utility is invoked without any arguments, the current
locale configuration is shown. Values for categories that are not set in
the environment or that are overridden by LC_ALL are displayed between
double quotes.
The options are as follows:
-a Display a list of supported locales.
-m Display a list of supported character encodings. On OpenBSD,
this always returns UTF-8 only.
charmap Display the currently selected character encoding. On OpenBSD,
this returns either US-ASCII or UTF-8.
A locale is a set of environment variables telling programs which
character encoding, language and cultural conventions the user prefers.
Programs in the OpenBSD base system ignore the locale except for the
character encoding, and it is not recommended to use any of these
variables except that the following non-default setting is supported as
an option:
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
Programs installed from packages(7) may or may not change behavior
according to the locale. Many programs use the X/Open System Interfaces
naming scheme for the contents of the variables listed below, which is
language[_TERRITORY][.encoding][@modifier]
The behavior of some library functions may also depend on the locale, and
it does on most other operating systems. The OpenBSD C library tends to
avoid locale-dependent behavior except with respect to character
encoding. See the manual pages of individual functions for details.
The character encoding locale LC_CTYPE instructs programs which character
encoding to assume for text input and to use for text output. A
character encoding maps each character of a given character set to a byte
sequence suitable for storing or transmitting the character.
The OpenBSD base system supports two locales: the default of LC_CTYPE=C
selects the US-ASCII character set and encoding, treating the bytes 0x80
to 0xff as non-printable characters of application-specific meaning.
LC_CTYPE=POSIX is an alias for LC_CTYPE=C. The alternative of
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 selects the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character
set, which is supported by many parts of the system, but not yet fully
supported by all parts.
If the value of LC_CTYPE ends in `.UTF-8', programs in the OpenBSD base
system ignore the beginning of it, treating for example zh_CN.UTF-8
exactly like en_US.UTF-8. Programs from packages(7) may however make a
difference. If the value of LC_CTYPE is unsupported, programs and
libraries in the OpenBSD base systems fall back to LC_CTYPE=C.
Some programs, for example write(1), deliberately ignore the locale and
always use US-ASCII only. See the manual pages of individual programs
for details.
ENVIRONMENT
The locale configuration consists of the following environment variables:
LC_ALL Overrides all other LC_* variables below.
LC_COLLATE Intended to affect collation order. It may for example
affect alphabetic sorting, regular expressions including
equivalence classes, and the strcoll(3) and strxfrm(3)
functions.
LC_CTYPE Intended to affect character encoding, character
classification, and case conversion. For example, it is
used by mbtowc(3), iswctype(3), iswalnum(3), towlower(3),
fgetwc(3), fputwc(3), printf(3), and scanf(3).
LC_MESSAGES Intended to affect the output of informative and diagnostic
messages and the interpretation of interactive responses,
in particular regarding the language. It is used by
catopen(3).
LC_MONETARY Intended to affect monetary formatting.
LC_NUMERIC Intended to affect numeric, non-monetary formatting, for
example the radix character and thousands separators. On
other operating systems, it may for example affect
printf(3), scanf(3), and strtod(3).
LC_TIME Intended to affect date and time formats. It may for
example affect strftime(3).
LANG Fallback if any of the above is unset.
NLSPATH Used by catopen(3) to locate message catalogs.
FILES
/usr/share/locale/UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
Character classification, case conversion, and character display
width database in mklocale(1) binary output format used by
setlocale(3).
/usr/local/share/locale/
Localization data for packages(7), in particular LC_MESSAGES
catalogs in GNU gettext format.
/usr/local/share/nls/
Localization data for packages(7), in particular LC_MESSAGES
catalogs in catopen(3) format.
/usr/src/share/locale/ctype/en_US.UTF-8.src
Character classification, case conversion, and character display
width database in mklocale(1) input format.
/usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/
Complete Unicode data used for generating the above database.
/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/perl/lib/unicore/UnicodeData.txt
The most important parts of Unicode data in a compact, more
easily human-readable format.
EXIT STATUS
The locale utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSO
mklocale(1), setlocale(3), Unicode::UCD(3p)
Related ports: converters/libiconv, devel/gettext, textproc/icu4c
STANDARDS
With respect to locale support, most libraries and programs in the
OpenBSD base system, including the locale utility, implement a subset of
the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 ("POSIX.1") specification.
HISTORY
The locale utility was first standardized in the X/Open Portability Guide
Issue 4 ("XPG4").
It was rewritten from scratch for OpenBSD 5.4 during the 2013 Toronto
hackathon.
AUTHORS
Stefan Sperling <
[email protected]> with contributions from Philip
Guenther <
[email protected]> and Jeremie Courreges-Anglas
<
[email protected]>. This manual page was written by Ingo Schwarze
<
[email protected]>.
BUGS
The locale concept is inadequate for inter-process communication. Two
processes exchanging text, for example over a network, using sockets, in
shared memory, or even using plain text files always need a protocol-
specific way to negotiate the character encoding used.
The list of supported locales is perpetually incomplete.
FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8 March 5, 2023 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8