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locale.gen

Section: File Formats (5)
Updated: July 2005
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NAME

locale.gen - Configuration file for locale-gen

DESCRIPTION

The file /etc/locale.gen lists the locales that are to be generated by the locale-gen command.

Each line is of the form:

Where <locale name> starts with a name as found in /usr/share/i18n/locales/. It must be unique in the file as it is used as the key to locale variables (e.g. when you do `export LANG="<locale name>"`). For default encodings, the <charset> is typically omitted, else it is appended with a "." separator.

Where <charset> is one of the character sets listed in /usr/share/i18n/charmaps (sans any suffix like ".gz"). It should use the same naming conventions too -- all caps, and dashes/underscores included. e.g. Use "UTF-8", not "utf8".

The locale-gen command will generate all the locales, placing them in /usr/lib/locale.

Comments start with the hash mark # and may only be on new lines.

OPTIONS

Options start with #% (to preserve backwards compatibility).

# This enables the "foo" option.
#%foo

no-locale-archive: Disable generation of the locale archive file and instead generate multiple files/directories for each locale. This slows down runtime greatly (by having multiple files spread out in the filesystem instead of a single binary file), but it does mean build time is much faster (as you can generate in parallel).
You should not use this option.

EXAMPLES

# Create a "en_US" locale using ISO-8859-1 encoding.
# When you set LANG=en_US or LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1, this is used.
en_US ISO-8859-1

# Create a "en_US" locale using UTF-8 encoding.
# When you set LANG=en_US.UTF-8, this is used.
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

AUTHORS

Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org>
Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>