z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

Appendix F. Localization
Internationalization enables you to work in a cultural context that is comfortable for
you through locales, character sets, and a number of special environment variables.
The process of adapting an internationalized application or program, particular to a
language or cultural milieu, is termed localization.
A locale is the subset of your environment that deals with language and cultural
conventions. It is made up of a number of categories, each of which is associated
with an environment variable and controls a specific aspect of the environment. The
following list shows the categories and their spheres of influence:
LC_COLLATE
Collating (sorting) order.
LC_CTYPE
Character classification and case conversion.
LC_MESSAGES
Formats of informative and diagnostic messages and interactive responses.
LC_MONETARY
Monetary formatting.
LC_NUMERIC
Numeric, nonmonetary formatting.
LC_TIME
Date and time formats.
LC_SYNTAX
EBCDIC-variant character encodings used by some C functions and
utilities.
To give a locale control over a category, set the corresponding variable to the name
of the locale. In addition to the environment variables associated with the
categories, there are two other variables which are used in conjunction with
localization, LANG and LC_ALL. All of these variables affect the performance of
the shell commands. The general effects apply to most commands, but certain
commands such as sort, with its dependence on LC_COLLATE, require special
attention to be paid to one or more of the variables; this discusses such cases in
the Localization topic of the command. The effects of each environment variable is
as follows:
LANG Determines the international language value. Utilities and applications can
use the information from the given locale to provide error messages and
instructions in that locale’s language. If LC_ALL variable is not defined, any
undefined variable is treated as though it contained the value of LANG.
LC_ALL
Overrides the value of LANG and the values of any of the other variables
starting with LC_.
LC_COLLATE
Identifies the locale that controls the collating (sorting) order of characters
and determines the behavior of ranges, equivalence classes, and
multicharacter collating elements.
LC_CTYPE
Identifies the locale that defines character classes (for example, alpha, digit,
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