Setting a locale globally

[Teske, Devin]

On Jun 14, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Polytropon wrote:

> On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:54:06 -0400, Mike. wrote:
>> On 6/14/2013 at 9:12 PM Polytropon wrote:
>> 
>> |On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:13:34 -0400, Mike. wrote:
>> |> I would like to set the locale of my 9.1 server to
>> |> 
>> |>    LANG="en_US.ISO8859-1"
>> |> 
>> |> 
>> |> globally, i.e., put the locale entry in one file, and then have the
>> |> locale propagate as I go into other shells and run various scripts.
>> |
>> |You can add this to /etc/csh.cshrc as it will be inherited by
>> |all interactive shells (login shells), unless of course they
>> |override it with ~/.cshrc:
>> |
>> |	setenv LANG en_US.ISO8859-1
>> 
>> That works for the login shell, but when I su to another user (e.g.,
>> root), LANG is no longer in the environment.
> 
> That depends on _how_ you su. For example, if you use su -m,
> the environment will not be modified, but the UID 0 is gained.
> See "man su" for details.
> 
> But you are correct in terms of what I mentioned: If some
> user-configuration changes or unsets $LANG, it will be gone,
> and it may even be possible that the setting will not be
> transmitted properly to a different shell ("inheriting
> environment"), especially if the shell is not the default
> login shell, but instead bash or zsh (when the setting is
> being made for csh only).
> 
> 
> 
>> |It's also possible to add it to /etc/profile and even make an
>> |addition to /etc/login.conf's "default" setting:
>> |
>> |	default:\
>> |		:setenv=LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1:...
>> 
>> That works for the login shell, but when I su to another user (e.g.,
>> root), LANG is no longer in the environment.
> 
> Try su -m. 
> 
> Anyway, login.conf should be the better solution compared
> to the csh approach illustrated above. It should work
> independently from the kind of shell.
> 

Also, you can get the sudo(8) utility to preserve LANG by adding it to the env_keep list in /usr/local/etc/sudoers

For example:

Step 1: (as root) visudo

Step 2: Find… (the default configuration)

## Locale settings
# Defaults env_keep += "LANG LANGUAGE LINGUAS LC_* _XKB_CHARSET"

Step 3: Un-comment the second line (of the two lines shown above).

Now whenever you use sudo(8) to execute a command, LANG (and a few others, like LC_ALL) are preserved.
-- 
Devin

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