Zhao Peng <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > output of echo $LANG: > > en_US.UTF-8 > > "LANG=C ls -ul" does do what I expected to do. > > What does "C" mean? character?
To be more specific, I probably should have specified LC_COLLATE instead of "LANG". No big deal. All of this stuff refers to "locale" settings, which all relates to "internationalization" (which is frequently abbrebiated "I18N"). I think that this web page gives a good description of what UTF-8 is: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/805-4123/6j3tmpc75?a=view UTF-8 is a file system safe Universal Character Set Transformation Format of Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646-1 formulated by XoJIG of X/Open in 1992 and approved by ISO and IEC as Amendment 2 to ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 in 1996. This is a far more precise description of what UTF-8 is than I can conjure up at this time of day. (-: So, part of the notion of a locale is a *character set*, and furthermore, there is an associated way to *collate/sort* these characters as well. en_US.UTF-8 sees 'a' and 'A' as being equivalent when these are sorted. When LANG=C, your telling the system that you want the {old, default, non-I18N, characters are functionally at most 1*sizeof(char) wide, this is how the "C" language originally did it} manner of sorting/collating. In this "locale", 'a' and "A" are different. Many people, including myself, are more used to the "C" locale's way of sorting, but we can see the merits of other locales too. You can learn more by reading the man pages for locale, setlocale(), strcoll(), etc. Regards, --kevin -- GnuPG ID: B280F24E And the madness of the crowd alumni.unh.edu!kdc Is an epileptic fit -- Tom Waits _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
