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Full Discussion: Undestanding LANG setting in /etc/environment
Operating Systems AIX Undestanding LANG setting in /etc/environment Post 302778199 by bakunin on Sunday 10th of March 2013 04:52:34 AM
Old 03-10-2013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron Boyce
Our UNIX admin did investigate and figured-out that change in LANG setting in /etc/environment has caused application to log process counts in log as Decimal instead of Integer and was told that LANG was changed to en_US from C.
There are many AIX facilities which are represented differently in various cultures. Language (of the man pages, of command status output, ...), how numbers are represented, keyboard layout and many other things. All this is controlled by some environment variables of which "LANG" is one (and probably the most important). Issue the "set" command and you will see "LANG", but probably also "LC_MESSAGES" and a few others.

It is possible to control this "language environment" for every process separately, simply by setting the language variable to a different value upon process start, like this:

Code:
# (export LANG=<some_value> ; command)

Now for the role of "/etc/environment": as you have issued "set" you sure have noticed there are a lot of variables assigned. Most of these variables are not set explicitly by you, but get assigned default values. These system-wide default values are stored in "/etc/environment". Have a look at it, it is a simple text file with declarations in the form

Code:
# comment line
variable=value

Every time you log in your environment initially gets filled with these defaults. After this your own changes to the environment are being applied and you can change and override any of these defaults. You certainly have a special user for the program you are talking about. If you depend on the LANG variable to have a certain value it is a wise idea to explicitly set it in your startup scripts ("~/.profile") even if it is to the same value as the default. Even if the default changes your environment will remain as it is. I suggest to add a line

Code:
LANG=C ; export LANG

to your profile or shell startup script. The "export" keyword will make sure every process started from this process inherits this setting. Btw.: the same is true for other environment settings one of your programs depend on. Set these explicitly, even if it is to the same value the variable already has. When the default changes you avoid possible problems.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

wc

WC(1)								   User Commands							     WC(1)

NAME

       wc - print newline, word, and byte counts for each file

SYNOPSIS

       wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...
       wc [OPTION]... --files0-from=F

DESCRIPTION

       Print  newline, word, and byte counts for each FILE, and a total line if more than one FILE is specified.  With no FILE, or when FILE is -,
       read standard input.  A word is a non-zero-length sequence of characters delimited by white space.  The options below may be used to select
       which counts are printed, always in the following order: newline, word, character, byte, maximum line length.

       -c, --bytes
	      print the byte counts

       -m, --chars
	      print the character counts

       -l, --lines
	      print the newline counts

       --files0-from=F
	      read input from the files specified by NUL-terminated names in file F; If F is - then read names from standard input

       -L, --max-line-length
	      print the length of the longest line

       -w, --words
	      print the word counts

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
	      output version information and exit

       GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/> Report wc translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>

AUTHOR

       Written by Paul Rubin and David MacKenzie.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       The full documentation for wc is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If the info and wc programs are properly installed at your site, the com-
       mand

	      info coreutils 'wc invocation'

       should give you access to the complete manual.

GNU coreutils 8.22						     June 2014								     WC(1)
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