Czech and local environment

Unix FI systems allow for flexible national settings. Two basic options are language and coding.

Language settings tell you how to talk to you. In what language are menus, error and other reports, and the like. The encoding setting defines the encoding of the documents in the editors, listing menus, and other texts that the system displays.

You will find your current setting to specify the command:

 locale 

on the command line. This command displays a set of variables that define the behavior of the locale (time format, phone numbers, money units, etc.). The format consists of two parts separated by a period, for example:

cs_CZ.ISO8859-2

First part

cs_CZ

defines the Czech language. Other options include:

en_US
sk_SK
fr_FR

and many others. This section defines what language to use when communicating with a user. Second part

ISO8859-2

defines the coding according to which the texts are interpreted. Other options include:

ISO-8859-1
UTF-8
koi8r

and many others. All the setup options the system knows can be listed with the command

locale -a

For example, if you want to change the setting for the UTF-8 language (which we found as an option in the previous command statement), we will do this by:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

in the ~ / .profile file.