I like to disable all locale specific differences in shell scripts. What is the preferred way to do it?
LANG=C or LC_ALL=C
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
LANG sets the default locale, i.e. the locale used when no more specific setting (LC_COLLATE, LC_NUMERIC, LC_TIME etc.) is provided; it doesn’t override any setting, it provides the base value. LC_ALL on the other hand overrides all locale settings.
Thus to override scripts’ settings, you should set LC_ALL.
You can check the effects of your settings by running locale. It shows the calculated values, in quotes, for all locale categories which aren’t explicitly set; in your example, LANG isn’t overriding LC_NUMERIC, it’s providing the default value. If LC_ALL and LC_NUMERIC aren’t set in the environment, the locale is taken from LANG, and locale shows that value for LC_NUMERIC, as indicated by the quotes.
See the locales manpage and the POSIX definitions of environment variables for details. See also How does the "locale" program work?
LANG does not override:
$ export LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8" $ export LANG=C $ printf "%.2f\n" 3.14 -bash: printf: 3.14: invalid number 3,00
But LC_ALL does:
$ export LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8" $ export LC_ALL=C $ printf "%.2f\n" 3.14 3.14