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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 MOJAVE

catopen

CATOPEN(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 						CATOPEN(3)

NAME

     catopen -- open message catalog

LIBRARY

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

     #include <nl_types.h>

     nl_catd
     catopen(const char *name, int oflag);

DESCRIPTION

     The catopen() function opens the message catalog specified by name and returns a message catalog descriptor.  If name contains a '/' then
     name specifies the full pathname for the message catalog, otherwise the value of the environment variable NLSPATH is used with the following
     substitutions:

     %N   The value of the name argument.

     %L   The value of the LANG environment variable or the LC_MESSAGES category (see below).

     %l   The language element from the LANG environment variable or from the LC_MESSAGES category.

     %t   The territory element from the LANG environment variable or from the LC_MESSAGES category.

     %c   The codeset element from the LANG environment variable or from the LC_MESSAGES category.

     %%   A single % character.

     An empty string is substituted for undefined values.

     Path names templates defined in NLSPATH are separated by colons (':').  A leading or two adjacent colons is equivalent to specifying %N.

     If the oflag argument is set to the NL_CAT_LOCALE constant, LC_MESSAGES locale category used to open the message catalog; using NL_CAT_LOCALE
     conforms to the X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4 (``XPG4'') standard.  You can specify 0 for compatibility with X/Open Portability Guide
     Issue 3 (``XPG3''); when oflag is set to 0, the LANG environment variable determines the message catalog locale.

     A message catalog descriptor remains valid in a process until that process closes it, or until a successful call to one of the exec(3) func-
     tion.

RETURN VALUES

     Upon successful completion, catopen() returns a message catalog descriptor.  Otherwise, (nl_catd) -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate
     the error.

ERRORS

     [EINVAL]		Argument name does not point to a valid message catalog, or catalog is corrupt.

     [ENAMETOOLONG]	An entire path to the message catalog exceeded 1024 characters.

     [ENOENT]		The named message catalog does not exists, or the name argument points to an empty string.

     [ENOMEM]		Insufficient memory is available.

SEE ALSO

     gencat(1), catclose(3), catgets(3), setlocale(3)

STANDARDS

     The catopen() function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'').

BSD
								 February 12, 2005							       BSD
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