On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:30:16PM +0200, I wrote: > Now compare > $ env - LANG=ja_JP LANGUAGE=de_DE cat -h > cat: Ung��ltige Option -- h > ,,cat --help�� gibt weitere Informationen. > $ env - LANG=fr_FR LANGUAGE=de_DE cat -h > cat: Ung�ltige Option -- h > ,,cat --help" gibt weitere Informationen. > The latter works as expected, but the former does not because of encoding > mismatch. In order to avoid such problems, LANGUAGE variable should almost > be set under UTF-8 locales only. You can check that the some command > with LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 works fine.
Note also that this output may differ from LANG=de_DE. E.g. on my system, de_DE is patched to fix #235759, thus I get $ env - LANG=de_DE cat -h cat: Ung�ltige Option -- h �cat --help� gibt weitere Informationen. (The difference is in quotes on the last line) In this case, LC_CTYPE=de_DE whereas "LANG=fr_FR LANGUAGE=de_DE" implies LC_CTYPE=fr_FR and transliteration is different. This is another reason why (IMO) LANGUAGE should be used with UTF-8 locales in order to avoid such strange side effects. Denis
