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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | STANDARDS | HISTORY | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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locale(1) General Commands Manual locale(1)
locale - get locale-specific information
locale [option]
locale [option] -a
locale [option] -m
locale [option] name ...
The locale command displays information about the current locale,
or all locales, on standard output.
When invoked without arguments, locale displays the current locale
settings for each locale category (see locale(5)), based on the
settings of the environment variables that control the locale (see
locale(7)). Values for variables set in the environment are
printed without double quotes, implied values are printed with
double quotes.
If either the -a or the -m option (or one of their long-format
equivalents) is specified, the behavior is as follows:
--all-locales
-a Display a list of all available locales. The -v option
causes the LC_IDENTIFICATION metadata about each locale to
be included in the output.
--charmaps
-m Display the available charmaps (character set description
files). To display the current character set for the
locale, use locale -c charmap.
The locale command can also be provided with one or more
arguments, which are the names of locale keywords (for example,
date_fmt, ctype-class-names, yesexpr, or decimal_point) or locale
categories (for example, LC_CTYPE or LC_TIME). For each argument,
the following is displayed:
• For a locale keyword, the value of that keyword to be
displayed.
• For a locale category, the values of all keywords in that
category are displayed.
When arguments are supplied, the following options are meaningful:
--category-name
-c For a category name argument, write the name of the locale
category on a separate line preceding the list of keyword
values for that category.
For a keyword name argument, write the name of the locale
category for this keyword on a separate line preceding the
keyword value.
This option improves readability when multiple name
arguments are specified. It can be combined with the -k
option.
--keyword-name
-k For each keyword whose value is being displayed, include
also the name of that keyword, so that the output has the
format:
keyword="value"
The locale command also knows about the following options:
--verbose
-v Display additional information for some command-line option
and argument combinations.
--help
-? Display a summary of command-line options and arguments and
exit.
--usage
Display a short usage message and exit.
--version
-V Display the program version and exit.
/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
Usual default locale archive location.
/usr/share/i18n/locales
Usual default path for locale definition files.
POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001.
$ locale;
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$ locale date_fmt;
%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y
$ locale -k date_fmt;
date_fmt="%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y"
$ locale -ck date_fmt;
LC_TIME
date_fmt="%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y"
$ locale LC_TELEPHONE;
+%c (%a) %l
(%a) %l
11
1
UTF-8
$ locale -k LC_TELEPHONE;
tel_int_fmt="+%c (%a) %l"
tel_dom_fmt="(%a) %l"
int_select="11"
int_prefix="1"
telephone-codeset="UTF-8"
The following example compiles a custom locale from the ./wrk
directory with the localedef(1) utility under the $HOME/.locale
directory, then tests the result with the date(1) command, and
then sets the environment variables LOCPATH and LANG in the shell
profile file so that the custom locale will be used in the
subsequent user sessions:
$ mkdir -p $HOME/.locale;
$ I18NPATH=./wrk/ localedef -f UTF-8 -i fi_SE $HOME/.locale/fi_SE.UTF-8;
$ LOCPATH=$HOME/.locale LC_ALL=fi_SE.UTF-8 date;
$ echo "export LOCPATH=\$HOME/.locale" >> $HOME/.bashrc;
$ echo "export LANG=fi_SE.UTF-8" >> $HOME/.bashrc;
localedef(1), charmap(5), locale(5), locale(7)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz
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⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
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improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 locale(1)
Pages that refer to this page: iconv(1), localedef(1), localeconv(3), newlocale(3), nl_langinfo(3), setlocale(3), sysconf(3), uselocale(3), charmap(5), locale(5), repertoiremap(5), locale(7), unicode(7), utf-8(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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