I believe I'm getting closer. I can't reinstall locales because with locales broken, I can't install any packages. Is it possible to do a package installation without its calling locales?
Mathias' suggestion that I run strace on the locale command did lead me to stumble on a likely culprit: $ strace -eopen locale -a open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 open("/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3 open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY) = 3 open("/usr/lib/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) ... This -1 error and the others that followed led me to /usr/lib/locales. I found no no "en_UTF-8" directory there, but to judge from backups, apparently there shouldn't be. My guess is that the the values for the locales variables are looked up in the locale-archive binary file found there. I did discover that my last four system backups had a /usr/lib/locale/local-archive file that was about 1.21 Mb in size and had remained the same since I first installed etch in April. However, a week ago the file suddenly shrank to 320 Kb. It seemed likely to me that this file was broken at that time, and a simple fix would be to copy the old version of the locale-archive file over from the backup. However, given that I don't have any clue how the locale system works, I'd appreciate a suggestion that a simple recovery of the original locale-archive file from backup would be OK and whether there are any other steps I need to take. -- Haines Brown, KB1GRM -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]