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System Management Concepts: Operating System and Devices

Understanding Locale Categories

A locale category is a particular grouping of language-specific and cultural-convention-specific data. For instance, data referring to date-and-time formatting, the names of the days of the week, names of the months, and other time-specific information is grouped into the LC_TIME category. Each category uses a set of keywords that describe the particulars of that locale subset.

The following standard categories can be defined in a locale definition source file:

LC_COLLATE
                          Defines character-collation or string-collation information.
LC_CTYPE
                          Defines character classification, case conversion, and other character attributes.
LC_MESSAGES
                          Defines the format for affirmative and negative responses.
LC_MONETARY
                          Defines rules and symbols for formatting monetary numeric information.
LC_NUMERIC
                          Defines rules and symbols for formatting nonmonetary numeric information.
LC_TIME
                          Defines a list of rules and symbols for formatting time and date information.
Note: Locale categories can only be modified by editing the locale definition source file; they should not be confused with the environment variables of the same name, which can be set from the command line.

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