What are the implications of setting LC_ALL on Solaris

Question

To support an application we just installed, I've been asked to add this command to the /etc/profile file on our Solaris 10 UNIX server:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8; export LC_ALL

The effect of this changes the "locale" on the server, which is currently not defined (defaulting to "C").

My question: is there any reason I should not make this change?

As an alternative, I can imagine writing a script that exports that variable, runs the application and then "unsets" it again. I don't mind doing that but I really don't know very much about the impact of making a change like this.

I also understand that the same change can be made to the /etc/default/init file. Would that be a better solution?

Answer 1

LC_ALL trumps all other environment settings. I strongly recommend not setting this system-wide, because it means that any application or user that wants to use different settings must first unset LC_ALL.

Instead, if one application needs specific locale settings, run it through a wrapper script.

#!/bin/sh
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 exec /path/to/application "$@"

Answer 2

UTF-8 is quite a better choice than the POSIX locale and is actually now the default Solaris 11 codeset.

I wouldn't expect anything wrong using it as it is fully upward compatible with ASCII.

As for en_US, there will be subtle differences like the character ordering or the way dates are displayed like exhibited in these commands:

$ export LC_ALL=C
$ date
Wed Aug 28 01:21:55 CEST 2013
$ printf "a\nb\nA\nB\nC\n" | sort
A
B
C
a
b
$ LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
$ date
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 01:21:58 AM CEST
$ printf "a\nb\nA\nB\nC\n" | sort
a
A
b
B
C

This won't affect system software as of course all provided locales are supported.

Applications that do require a strict POSIX behavior should set LC_ALL to C or POSIX.

As for where to implement the change, the better way is by editing the /etc/default/init file which will set every process default locale and not only sh, ksh, bash and zsh.