locale

- get locale-specific information

Synopsis

locale [-a | -m]

locale [-ck] name...

Description

The locale utility writes information about the current locale environment, or all public locales, to the standard output. For the purposes of this section, a public locale is one provided by the implementation that is accessible to the application.

When locale is invoked without any arguments, it summarizes the current locale environment for each locale category as determined by the settings of the environment variables.

When invoked with operands, it writes values that have been assigned to the keywords in the locale categories, as follows:

• Specifying a keyword name selects the named keyword and the category containing that keyword.

• Specifying a category name selects the named category and all keywords in that category.

Options

The following options are supported:

-a

Writes information about all available public locales. The available locales include POSIX, representing the POSIX locale.

-c

Writes the names of selected locale categories. The -c option increases readability when more than one category is selected (for example, via more than one keyword name or via a category name). It is valid both with and without the -k option.

-k

Writes the names and values of selected keywords. The implementation may omit values for some keywords; see OPERANDS.

-m

Writes names of available charmaps; see localedef(1).

Operands

The following operand is supported:

name

The name of a locale category, the name of a keyword in a locale category, or the reserved name charmap. The named category or keyword is selected for output. If a single name represents both a locale category name and a keyword name in the current locale, the results are unspecified; otherwise, both category and keyword names can be specified as name operands, in any sequence.

Examples

Example 1 Examples of the locale utility

In the following examples, the assumption is that locale environment variables are set as follows:

LANG=locale_x LC_COLLATE=locale_y

The command locale would result in the following output:

LANG=locale_x
LC_CTYPE="locale_x"
LC_NUMERIC="locale_x"
LC_TIME="locale_x"
LC_COLLATE=locale_y
LC_MONETARY="locale_x"
LC_MESSAGES="locale_x"
LC_ALL=

The command

LC_ALL=POSIX locale -ck decimal_point

would produce:

LC_NUMERIC
decimal_point="."

The following command shows an application of locale to determine whether a user-supplied response is affirmative:

if printf "%s\n" "$response" | /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -Eq\
        "$(locale yesexpr)"
then
    affirmative processing goes here
else
    non-affirmative processing goes here
fi

Environment Variables

See environ(5) for the descriptions of LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

The LANG, LC_*, and NLSPATH environment variables must specify the current locale environment to be written out. These environment variables are used if the -a option is not specified.

Exit Status

The following exit values are returned:

0

All the requested information was found and output successfully.

>0

An error occurred.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

See Also

localedef(1), attributes(5), charmap(5), environ(5), locale(5), locale_alias(5), standards(5)

Notes

If LC_CTYPE or keywords in the category LC_CTYPE are specified, only the values in the range 0x00-0x7f are written out.

If LC_COLLATE or keywords in the category LC_COLLATE are specified, no actual values are written out.

The locale names shown at locale -a output are restricted to canonical locale names. For the accepted and supported locale name aliases, see locale_alias(5)