System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Locale Variables

The LANG and LC environment variables specify the locale-specific conversions and conventions for the shell, like time zones, collation orders, and formats of dates, time, currency, and numbers. In addition, you can use the stty command in a user initialization file to set whether the system will support multibyte characters.

LANG sets all possible conversions and conventions for the given locale. If you have special needs, you can set various aspects of localization separately through these LC variables: LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_NUMERIC, LC_MONETARY, and LC_TIME.

The following table describes some of the values for the LANG and LC environment variables.

Table 4–21 Values for LANG and LC Variables

Value 

Locale 

de

German

fr

French

iso_8859_1

English and European

it

Italian

japanese

Japanese

korean

Korean

sv

Swedish

tchinese

Taiwanese

Examples—Setting the Locale Using the LANG Variables

The following examples show how to set the locale by using the LANG environment variables. In a C-shell user initialization file, you would add the following:


setenv LANG DE

In a Bourne- or Korn-shell user initialization file, you would add the following:


LANG=DE; export LANG