path: root/usr.bin/locale/locale.1

.\" $OpenBSD: locale.1,v 1.6 2016/10/24 13:27:06 schwarze Exp $
.\"
.\" Copyright 2016 Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>
.\" Copyright 2013 Stefan Sperling <stsp@openbsd.org>
.\"
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.Dd $Mdocdate: October 24 2016 $
.Dt LOCALE 1
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm locale
.Nd character encoding and localization conventions
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm locale
.Op Fl a | Fl m
.Sh DESCRIPTION
A locale is a set of environment variables telling programs which
character encoding, language and cultural conventions the user
prefers.
The only non-default setting recommended for
.Ox
is:
.Pp
.Dl export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
.Pp
If the
.Nm
utility is invoked without any arguments, the current locale
configuration is shown.
.Pp
The options are as follows:
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It Fl a
Display a list of supported locales.
.It Fl m
Display a list of supported character encodings.
On
.Ox ,
this always returns UTF-8 only.
.El
.Pp
Programs in the
.Ox
base system ignore the locale except for the character encoding.
Programs installed from
.Xr 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
.Sm off
.Ar language
.Op _ Ar TERRITORY
.Op \&. Ar encoding
.Op @ Ar modifier
.Sm on
.Pp
The behavior of some library functions may also depend on the locale,
and it does on most other operating systems.
The
.Ox
C library tends to avoid locale-dependent behavior except with
respect to character encoding.
See the manual pages of individual functions for details.
.Pp
The character encoding locale
.Ev 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.
.Pp
The
.Ox
base system supports two locales: the default of
.Li 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, whereas
.Li LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
selects the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set.
.Li LC_CTYPE=POSIX
is an alias for
.Li LC_CTYPE=C .
.Pp
If the value of
.Ev LC_CTYPE
ends in
.Ql .UTF-8 ,
programs in the
.Ox
base system ignore the beginning of it, treating for example zh_CN.UTF-8
exactly like en_US.UTF-8.
Programs from
.Xr packages 7
may however make a difference.
If the value of
.Ev LC_CTYPE
is unsupported, programs and libraries in the
.Ox
base systems fall back to
.Li LC_CTYPE=C .
.Pp
Some programs, for example
.Xr write 1 ,
deliberately ignore the locale and always use US-ASCII only.
See the manual pages of individual programs for details.
.Sh ENVIRONMENT
The locale configuration consists of the following environment variables:
.Bl -tag -width LC_MONETARYX
.It Ev LC_ALL
Overrides all other
.Ev LC_*
variables below.
.It Ev LC_COLLATE
Intended to affect collation order.
It may for example affect alphabetic sorting, regular expressions
including equivalence classes, and the
.Xr strcoll 3
and
.Xr strxfrm 3
functions.
.It Ev LC_CTYPE
Intended to affect character encoding, character classification,
and case conversion.
For example, it is used by
.Xr mbtowc 3 ,
.Xr iswctype 3 ,
.Xr iswalnum 3 ,
.Xr towlower 3 ,
.Xr fgetwc 3 ,
.Xr fputwc 3 ,
.Xr printf 3 ,
and
.Xr scanf 3 .
.It Ev 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
.Xr catopen 3 .
.It Ev LC_MONETARY
Intended to affect monetary formatting.
.It Ev 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
.Xr printf 3 ,
.Xr scanf 3 ,
and
.Xr strtod 3 .
.It Ev LC_TIME
Intended to affect date and time formats.
It may for example affect
.Xr strftime 3 .
.It Ev LANG
Fallback if any of the above is unset.
.It Ev NLSPATH
Used by
.Xr catopen 3
to locate message catalogs.
.El
.Sh FILES
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It Pa /usr/share/locale/UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
Character classification, case conversion, and character display
width database in
.Xr mklocale 1
binary output format used by
.Xr setlocale 3 .
.It Pa /usr/local/share/locale/
Localization data for
.Xr packages 7 ,
in particular
.Ev LC_MESSAGES
catalogs in GNU gettext format.
.It Pa /usr/local/share/nls/
Localization data for
.Xr packages 7 ,
in particular
.Ev LC_MESSAGES
catalogs in
.Xr catopen 3
format.
.It Pa /usr/src/share/locale/ctype/en_US.UTF-8.src
Character classification, case conversion, and character display
width database in
.Xr mklocale 1
input format.
.It Pa /usr/libdata/perl5/unicore/
Complete Unicode data used for generating the above database.
.It Pa /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.
.El
.Sh EXIT STATUS
.Ex -std locale
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr mklocale 1 ,
.Xr setlocale 3 ,
.Xr Unicode::UCD 3p
.Pp
Related ports: converters/libiconv, devel/gettext, textproc/icu4c
.Sh STANDARDS
With respect to locale support, most libraries and programs in the
.Ox
base system, including the
.Nm
utility, implement a subset of the
.St -p1003.1-2008
specification.
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
utility was first standardized in the
.St -xpg4 .
.Pp
It was rewritten from scratch for
.Ox 5.4
during the 2013 Toronto hackathon.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An -nosplit
.An Stefan Sperling Aq Mt stsp@openbsd.org
with contributions from
.An Philip Guenther Aq Mt guenther@openbsd.org
and
.An Jeremie Courreges-Anglas Aq Mt jca@openbsd.org .
This manual page was written by
.An Ingo Schwarze Aq Mt schwarze@openbsd.org .
.Sh BUGS
The
.Nm
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.
.Pp
The list of supported locales is perpetually incomplete.