Urgent help required: Query regarding LC Variables

Question

Hi All
Sometime earlier I was working on a performance issue raised by a customer. It was shell script that was taking almost 8-9 hrs to complete. During my research I came across a fact that there were some variables which were not set, the LC variables were impacting the sort funnel operations because of which the script was taking a long time to execute.
I asked them to export the following commands, after which the program went on smoothly and finished in a couple of mins:
export LC_COLLATE=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_MESSAGES=C
export LC_MONETARY=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LC_MONETARY=en_US.ISO8859-1
export HZ=100
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Later I did recover that setting the LC_COLLATE to C, is not helping and the program was again taking a lot of time. Few questions that I want to ask are:
1. Can someone please tell me, what each of these variable mean and how these values make a difference.
2. When I exported LC_COLLATE=en_US.ISO8859-1, it worked fine, but when i tried with the defalut value LC_COLLATE=C, then why the program didnt work.
As this issue is still going on, hence I would request All to provide their valuable inputs and let me know as much as possible.
Appreciate your help in this regard.
Thanks
Amit
Hi All
A new development in this regard. The customer has send us a screen shot in which they were trying to export the locale variable using the commands which I have pasted above. I can see in the screen shot that while exporting LC_COLLATE and LC_TYPE, they get a message that ""ksh: export: couldn't set locale correctly"".
Request everyone to please give their inputs as it's a bit urgent.
Thanks for all the help in advance.
Thanks
Amit
Some help required please...
Edited by: amitsinhaengg on Jul 22, 2009 2:03 AM
Edited by: amitsinhaengg on Jul 22, 2009 2:06 AM

Answer 1

LC_CTYPE
Controls the behavior of character handling functions.
LC_TIME
Specifies date and time formats, including month names, days of the week, and common full and abbreviated representations.
LC_MONETARY
Specifies monetary formats, including the currency symbol for the locale, thousands separator, sign position, the number of fractional digits, and so forth.
LC_NUMERIC
Specifies the decimal delimiter (or radix character), the thousands separator, and the grouping.
LC_COLLATE
Specifies a collation order and regular expression definition for the locale.
LC_MESSAGES
Specifies the language in which the localized messages are written, and affirmative and negative responses of the locale (yes and no strings and expressions).
You can use command
# locale -k LC_CTYPE
to see more detail about each type.