Locale settings

How to change language settings

Language settings are used within Linux to decide things like the language of prompts, date and monetary settings, and how to handle "special" characters.

As the HPC is used by people with very diverse backgrounds, we do not set a default setting for this. Of course, the OS still has defaults, so everything still works.

If you want to change the default, the best way is to add your preferred setting to your .bashrc, and also to run scripts, as they usually don't load your .bashrc .

To see the available categories and the language they use, use this:

locale

To see the available language options, use this:

locale -a

As you saw, there are two main categories, LANG and LC_*. If you want to change them, you will have to change them separately, like this:

export LANG=nl_NL.utf8
export LC_ALL=nl_NL.utf8

After the above, you will have error messages in Dutch, and the currency symbol will be the Euro sign. To see what the active settings are for a certain category, you can (e.g. MONETARY) do this:

locale -k LC_MONETARY