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olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

[Solved] Exact signification of the locales.

I am a little confused about the signification of each of the locale. In particular what exactly the LANG environment variable is supposed to do? in what it is supposed to differ from LC_MESSAGES? My language is French but like many international user, I want somehow a mixed locale. I would like all the error messages, output of standard utilities be in standard English (so that I can easily google them). However I want some of the locale to be French (certainly LC_PAPER, maybe other ones). In LibreOffice, it chooses the default language for new documents according to the locale but it is not clear what locale exactly it chooses. Of course, I can override this easily for LibreOffice but this is still confusing in general. Is there a locale supposed to be used for the default spell checking?

Last edited by olive (2015-11-17 15:08:31)

mkey

Member

Registered: 2015-02-09

Posts: 38

Re: [Solved] Exact signification of the locales.

LANG is a environment variable which gives a default value for every LC_* variable which has not been explicitly set.
LC_ALL overrides all LC_* values, even ones that have been set.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Local … t_settings which gives a pretty good explanation for each variable.

I guess in your case you want to set LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 and LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
Have a try

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

Re: [Solved] Exact signification of the locales.

Thanks for the link!