environ(5) File Formats Manual environ(5)
NAME
environ - user environment
DESCRIPTION
An array of strings called the is made available by exec(2) when a process begins. By convention, these strings have the form name=value.
The following names are used by various commands (listed in alphabetical order):
Name of the user's login directory, set by
login(1) from the password file (see passwd(4)).
Identifies the user's requirements for native language,
local customs and coded character set, if the environment variables and are unset or null.
The format of is:
The valid values for are supported locales. (See lang(5).) Native Language Support (NLS) is initiated at run-time by calling
setlocale(3C). The following call to binds the execution of a program to the user's language requirements:
This call initializes the program locale from the environment variables associated with provides the necessary defaults if any
of the category-specific environment variables are not set or set to the empty string.
The environment variable can have a maximum length of bytes (see header file
Defines language options for mode and data order in the form:
values are given in English as an ASCII character string. mode describes the mode of a file where (ell) represents Latin mode
and represents non-Latin mode. Non-Latin mode is assumed for values other than and order describes the data order of a file
where is keyboard order and is screen order.
Determines the values for all locale categories. The value of
has precedence over any of the other environment variables and
Determines the user's requirements for language,
territory, and codeset with respect to character collation, character classification and conversion, output messages, currency
symbol and monetary value format, numeric data presentation, and time formats, respectively. If and any of these are not
defined in the environment, provides the defaults.
Syntax for the environment variables and is:
The language field conforms with ISO 639 standard for language names and the territory field conforms with the ISO 3166 terri-
tory names. For a list of the locale names, see lang(5).
The field allows the user to select between more than one value of a category within the same language definition. HP-UX does
not currently provide locales with modifiers.
The values of the locale categories are determined by a precedence order; the first condition met below determines the value:
1. If the environment variable is defined and is not null, the value of is used.
2. If the environment variable (is defined and is not null, the value of the environment variable is used to initialize the
category that corresponds to the environment variable.
3. If the environment variable is defined and is not null, the value of the environment variable is used.
4. If the environment variable is not set or is set to the empty string, the POSIX/C default locale is used. (See lang(5).)
Determines the locale category for character collation. It determines
collation information for regular expressions and sorting, including equivalence classes and multi-character collating ele-
ments, in various utilities and strcoll(3C) and strxfrm(3C) (see string(3C)).
Determines the locale category for
character classification (such as alphabetic, digit, upper-case.) See isalpha(3C), isdigit(3C), and isupper(3C), character
conversion in ctype(3C). See toupper(3C), tolower(3C), and the interpretation of text as single-byte or multi-byte characters
in conv(3C).
Determines the locale category for processing affirmative and negative
responses and the language and cultural conventions in which diagnostic and informative messages should be written. It may
also affect the behavior of catopen(3C) in determining the message catalog to open.
Determines the locale category for monetary-related numeric
formatting information.
Determines the locale category for numeric formatting information
(such as the thousands separator and the radix character) in various utilities as well as the formatted I/O operations in
printf(3S) and scanf(3S) and the string conversion functions in strtod(3C).
Determines the locale category for date and time formatting information.
It affects the behavior of time functions in strftime(3C).
Contains a colon-separated list of directory prefixes to be searched by
man(1) for manual entries. Upon logging in, (or sets If the file exists, the default settings are taken from this file.
uses the same syntax as the environment variable, with the addition of recognizing the specifiers and as used in the environ-
ment variable. See below for a description of these specifiers. This provides a way to specify paths to locale-specific man-
ual entries.
It is assumed that each of the prefixes given in contain subdirectories of the form and (See man(1), catman(1M), and fix-
man(1M).)
Contains a sequence of pseudo-pathnames used by
catopen(3C) when attempting to locate message catalogs. Each pseudo-pathname contains a name template consisting of an
optional path prefix, one or more substitution field descriptors, a file name and an optional file name suffix. For example:
defines that catopen(3C) should look for all message catalogs in the directory , where the catalog name should be constructed
from the name parameter passed to catopen(3C) (%N) with the suffix
Field descriptors consist of a followed by a single character. Field descriptors and their substitution values are:
The value of the
name parameter passed to catopen(3C).
The value of
The language element from
The territory element from
The codeset element from
Replaced
by a single
For example, given:
catopen(3C) attempts to open the file as a message catalog.
A null string is substituted if the specified value is not defined. Separators are not included in and substitutions. Note
that a default value is not supplied for If is not set and had the value in the previous example, catopen(3C) would attempt to
open the file as a message catalog.
Path names defined in are separated by colons A leading colon or two adjacent colons is equivalent to specifying For example,
given:
catopen(3C) with the oflag parameter set to will attempt to open the following files in the indicated order: and The first file
successfully opened is taken as the message catalog.
A default pseudo-pathname defined by the system is effectively appended to and used by catopen(3C) whenever a message catalog
cannot be opened in any of the user defined pseudo-pathnames. This system-wide default path is:
If catopen(3C) is invoked from a or application with owner root, the environment variable is not used. Instead the system file
is used to locate the message catalogs. See nlspath(4) for details.
indicates the paginator through which output from certain commands is piped.
Its value must be a string specifying the complete command line of the desired paginator. Two examples are:
affects several commands, including man(1) and the interactive mailers. Some of the affected commands provide alternate means
of selecting a pager in case there is a conflict. See the individual manual entries for details.
indicates the sequence of directory prefixes that
sh(1), time(1), nice(1), nohup(1), and others search when looking for a file known by an incomplete path name. Prefixes are
separated by colons The login(1) command sets
identifies the kind of terminal for which output is to be prepared.
This information is used by commands such as vi(1) and mm(1), which can exploit special capabilities of that terminal.
sets time zone information.
can be set using the format:
where:
Three or more bytes that designate
the standard time zone and summer (or daylight-savings) time zone is required. If is not specified, summer time
does not apply in this locale. Each of these fields may occur in either of two formats quoted or unquoted.
In the quoted form, the first character shall be the less-than character and the last character shall be the
greater-than character. All characters between these quoting characters shall be alphanumeric characters from the
portable character set in the current locale, the plus-sign character, or the minus-sign character. The and fields
in this case shall not include the quoting characters.
In the unquoted form, any characters other than digits, comma minus plus or ASCII NUL are allowed.
offset offset is the value that must be added to local time to arrive at Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Offset is of
the form :
Hour (hh) is any value from 0 through 23. The optional minutes (mm) and seconds (ss) fields are a value from 0
through 59. The hour field is required. If offset is preceded by a the time zone is east of the Prime Meridian.
A preceding offset indicates that the time zone is west of the Prime Meridian. The default case is west of the
Prime Meridian.
rule rule indicates when to change to and from summer (daylight-savings) time. The rule has the form :
where the first specifies when to change from standard to summer time, and the second specifies when to change
back. The time field is expressed in current local time.
The form of date should be one of the following :
Julian day n (1 through 365). Leap days are not counted. February 29 cannot be referenced.
n The zero-based Julian day (0 through 365). Leap days are counted. February 29 can be referenced.
The d day (0 through 6) of week n (1 through 5) of month m (1 through 12) of the year. Week 5 refers to
the last day d of month m. Week 1 is the week in which the first day of the month falls. Day 0 is
Sunday.
time Time has the same format as offset except that no leading sign or is allowed. The default, if time is
not given, is 02:00:00.
While the STD field and the offset field for STD must be specified, if the DST field is also provided, the system
will supply default values for other fields not specified. These default values come from file (see tztab(4)),
and, in general, reflect the various historical dates for start and end of summer time.
Additional names may be placed in the environment by the export command and arguments in sh(1), or by exec(2). It is unwise to add names
that conflict with the following shell variables frequently exported by files: and
The environment of a process is accessible from C by using the global variable:
which points to an array of pointers to the strings that comprise the environment. The array is terminated by a null pointer.
Notes
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
International Code Set Support
The and environment variables provide support for internationalized applications. The standard utilities make use of these environment
variables as described here and in the individual Environment Variables subsection of the utilities.
If these variables specify locale categories that are not based upon the same underlying codeset, the results are unspecified, and the
behavior of regular expressions APIs', such as, and may be affected.
WARNINGS
Some HP-UX commands and library routines do not use the or environment variables. Some commands do not use message catalogs, so does not
affect their behavior. See the section of specific commands and library routines for implementation details.
AUTHOR
was developed by AT&T and HP.
SEE ALSO
env(1), login(1), sh(1), exec(2), catopen(3C), ctime(3C), getenv(3C), setlocale(3C), nlspath(4), profile(4), tztab(4), lang(5), term(5).
STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
environ(5)