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Many of the messages from the Unix commands are available in different languages. This is controlled by the LANG environment variable, the default being En_US meaning English in the US. All the default messages have a message number associated with them, e.g.: $ cat no-such-file cat: 0652-050 Cannot open no-such-file. If you prefer the terser Unix-looking error message, set your environment variable LC_MESSAGES to C, and you will get: $ cat no-such-file cat: Cannot open no-such-file. By default LC_MESSAGES is the same as your environment LANG. Setting LANG does also work, but should be avoided since it changes app-defaults lookup etc. See locale(): LC_ALL
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Last Update May 13 2007 @ 00:21 AM