locale.conf
systemd
Developer
Lennart
Poettering
lennart@poettering.net
locale.conf
5
locale.conf
configuration file for locale settings
/etc/locale.conf
Description
The /etc/locale.conf file
configures system-wide locale settings. It is read at
early-boot by
systemd1.
The basic file format of
locale.conf is a
newline-separated list of environment-like
shell-compatible variable assignments. It is possible
to source the configuration from shell scripts,
however, beyond mere variable assignments no shell
features are supported, allowing applications to read
the file without implementing a shell compatible
execution engine.
Note that the kernel command line options
locale.LANG=,
locale.LANGUAGE=,
locale.LC_CTYPE=,
locale.LC_NUMERIC=,
locale.LC_TIME=,
locale.LC_COLLATE=,
locale.LC_MONETARY=,
locale.LC_MESSAGES=,
locale.LC_PAPER=,
locale.LC_NAME=,
locale.LC_ADDRESS=,
locale.LC_TELEPHONE=,
locale.LC_MEASUREMENT=,
locale.LC_IDENTIFICATION= may be
used to override the locale settings at boot.
The locale settings configured in
/etc/locale.conf are system-wide
and are inherited by every service or user, unless
overridden or unset by individual programs or
individual users.
Depending on the operating system other
configuration files might be checked for locale
configuration as well, however only as
fallback.
Options
The following locale settings may be set using
/etc/locale.conf:
LANG=,
LANGUAGE=,
LC_CTYPE=,
LC_NUMERIC=,
LC_TIME=,
LC_COLLATE=,
LC_MONETARY=,
LC_MESSAGES=,
LC_PAPER=,
LC_NAME=,
LC_ADDRESS=,
LC_TELEPHONE=,
LC_MEASUREMENT=,
LC_IDENTIFICATION=. Note that
LC_ALL may not be be configured in
this file. For details about the meaning and semantics
of these settings, refer to
locale7.
Example
German locale with English messages
/etc/locale.conf:
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=C
See Also
systemd1,
locale7,
systemd-localed.service8