C Locale – the Default Locale

The C locale, also known as the POSIX locale, is the POSIX system default locale for all POSIX-compliant systems. The Oracle Solaris operating system is a POSIX system. The Single UNIX Specification, Version 3, defines the C locale. Register to read and download the specification at: http://www.unix.org/version3/online.html.

You can specify that your internationalized programs run in the C locale, in one of two ways:

• Unset all locale environment variables.

  system% unsetenv LC_ALL LANG LC_CTYPE LC_COLLATE LC_NUMERIC \
  					LC_TIME LC_MONETARY LC_MESSAGES

  Unsets all locale environment variables. Runs the application in the C locale.

• Explicitly set the locale to C or POSIX.

  system% setenv LC_ALL C
  system% setenv LANG C

  Some applications check the LANG environment variables without actually calling setlocale(3C) to reference the current locale. In this case, setenv explicitly sets the C locale by specifying the LC_ALL and LANG locale environment variables. For the precedence relationship among locale environment variables, see the setlocale(3C) man page.

To check the current locale settings in a terminal environment, run the locale(1) command.

system% locale