Just out of curiosity, what is the meaning of LC_IDENTIFICATION
?
The reason I am asking is, that a fresh US-English installation of Linux Mint (I guess Ubuntu would be the same), located in “Jerusalem” for time zone, left me with the following mix and match locale in /etc/default/locale
:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_TIME=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_NAME=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_ADDRESS=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_TELEPHONE=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_MEASUREMENT=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=he_IL.UTF-8 LC_ALL=
As I was working to fix it to my liking, I was wondering if I should also update LC_IDENTIFICATION
.
The man
page for locale(1)
says “Metadata about the locale information”, but it does not tell me exactly what the effect of changing it would be. Can you think of any application or API using this variable and how?
Best Answer
It appears that by setting
LC_IDENTIFICATION
you indeed supply metadata for a given locale specification, as seen in this example of the Uzbekistan locale:Or another variant with the Greek locale:
LC_IDENTIFICATION
is a GNU extension. I could not find a specification of it though. Since it's just metadata, I'm assuming it's not used in any userland programs.