Environment Variables – What Does ‘LC_ALL=C’ Do?

environment-variableslocale

What does the C value for LC_ALL do in Unix-like systems?

I know that it forces the same locale for all aspects but what does C do?

Best Answer

It forces applications to use the default language for output:

$ LC_ALL=es_ES man
¿Qué página de manual desea?

$ LC_ALL=C man
What manual page do you want?

and forces sorting to be byte-wise:

$ LC_ALL=en_US sort <<< $'a\nb\nA\nB'
a
A
b
B

$ LC_ALL=C sort <<< $'a\nb\nA\nB'
A
B
a
b
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