LUIT(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   LUIT(1)

NAME

       luit - Locale and ISO 2022 support for Unicode terminals

SYNOPSIS

       luit [ options ] [ -- ] [ program [ args ] ]

DESCRIPTION

       Luit  is  a filter that can be run between an arbitrary application and a UTF-8 terminal emulator.  It will convert application output from
       the locale's encoding into UTF-8, and convert terminal input from UTF-8 into the locale's encoding.

       An application may also request switching to a different output encoding using ISO 2022 and ISO 6429 escape sequences.  Use of this feature
       is discouraged: multilingual applications should be modified to directly generate UTF-8 instead.

       Luit  is  usually  invoked  transparently by the terminal emulator.  For information about running luit from the command line, see EXAMPLES
       below.

OPTIONS

       -h     Display some summary help and quit.

       -list  List the supported charsets and encodings, then quit.

       -v     Be verbose.

       -c     Function as a simple converter from standard input to standard output.

       -x     Exit as soon as the child dies.  This may cause luit to lose data at the end of the child's output.

       -argv0 name
	      Set the child's name (as passed in argv[0]).

       -encoding encoding
	      Set up luit to use encoding rather than the current locale's encoding.

       +oss   Disable interpretation of single shifts in application output.

       +ols   Disable interpretation of locking shifts in application output.

       +osl   Disable interpretation of character set selection sequences in application output.

       +ot    Disable interpretation of all sequences and pass all sequences in application output to the terminal unchanged.  This  may  lead	to
	      interesting results.

       -k7    Generate seven-bit characters for keyboard input.

       +kss   Disable generation of single-shifts for keyboard input.

       +kssgr Use  GL  codes  after  a	single	shift for keyboard input.  By default, GR codes are generated after a single shift when generating
	      eight-bit keyboard input.

       -kls   Generate locking shifts (SO/SI) for keyboard input.

       -gl gn Set the initial assignment of GL.  The argument should be one of g0, g1, g2 or g3.  The default depends on the locale, but  is  usu-
	      ally g0.

       -gr gk Set the initial assignment of GR.  The default depends on the locale, and is usually g2 except for EUC locales, where it is g1.

       -g0 charset
	      Set the charset initially selected in G0.  The default depends on the locale, but is usually ASCII.

       -g1 charset
	      Set the charset initially selected in G1.  The default depends on the locale.

       -g2 charset
	      Set the charset initially selected in G2.  The default depends on the locale.

       -g3 charset
	      Set the charset initially selected in G3.  The default depends on the locale.

       -ilog filename
	      Log into filename all the bytes received from the child.

       -olog filename
	      Log into filename all the bytes sent to the terminal emulator.

       --     End of options.

EXAMPLES

       The  most  typical  use of luit is to adapt an instance of XTerm to the locale's encoding.  Current versions of XTerm invoke luit automati-
       cally when it is needed.  If you are using an older release of XTerm, or a different terminal emulator, you may invoke luit manually:

	      $ xterm -u8 -e luit

       If you are running in a UTF-8 locale but need to access a remote machine that doesn't support UTF-8, luit can adapt the	remote	output	to
       your terminal:

	      $ LC_ALL=fr_FR luit ssh legacy-machine

       Luit  is also useful with applications that hard-wire an encoding that is different from the one normally used on the system or want to use
       legacy escape sequences for multilingual output.  In particular, versions of Emacs that do not speak UTF-8 well can use luit for  multilin-
       gual output:

	      $ luit -encoding 'ISO 8859-1' emacs -nw

       And then, in Emacs,

	      M-x set-terminal-coding-system RET iso-2022-8bit-ss2 RET

FILES

       /usr/lib/X11/fonts/encodings/encodings.dir
	      The system-wide encodings directory.

       /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.alias
	      The file mapping locales to locale encodings.

SECURITY

       On systems with SVR4 (``Unix-98'') ptys (Linux version 2.2 and later, SVR4), luit should be run as the invoking user.

       On systems without SVR4 (``Unix-98'') ptys (notably BSD variants), running luit as an ordinary user will leave the tty world-writable; this
       is a security hole, and luit will generate a warning (but still accept to run).	A possible solution is to make luit suid root; luit should
       drop privileges sufficiently early to make this safe.  However, the startup code has not been exhaustively audited, and the author takes no
       responsibility for any resulting security issues.

       Luit will refuse to run if it is installed setuid and cannot safely drop privileges.

BUGS

       None of this complexity should be necessary.  Stateless UTF-8 throughout the system is the way to go.

       Charsets with a non-trivial intermediary byte are not yet supported.

       Selecting alternate sets of control characters is not supported and will never be.

SEE ALSO

       xterm(1), unicode(7), utf-8(7), charsets(7).  Character Code Structure and Extension Techniques (ISO 2022, ECMA-35).  Control Functions for
       Coded Character Sets (ISO 6429, ECMA-48).

AUTHOR

       The  version  of  Luit included in this X.Org Foundation release was originally written by Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@freedesktop.org> for the
       XFree86 Project.

X Version 11							    luit 1.0.4								   LUIT(1)