locale.gen(5)

NAME
locale.gen - Configuration file for locale-gen

DESCRIPTION
The file /etc/locale.gen lists the locales that are to be generated by the locale-gen command. Each line is of the form: <locale name> <charset> Where <locale name> starts with a name as found in /usr/share/i18n/locales/. It must be unique in the file as it is used as the key to locale variables (e.g. when you do `export LANG="<locale name>"`). For default encodings, the <charset> is typically omitted, else it is appended with a "." separator. Where <charset> is one of the character sets listed in /usr/share/i18n/charmaps (sans any suffix like ".gz"). It should use the same naming conventions too -- all caps, and dashes/underscores included. e.g. Use "UTF-8", not "utf8". The locale-gen command will generate all the locales, placing them in /usr/lib/locale. Comments start with the hash mark # and may only be on new lines.

OPTIONS
Options start with #% (to preserve backwards compatibility). # This enables the "foo" option.
#%foo

no-locale-archive
    Disable generation of the locale archive file and instead generate multiple files/directories for each locale. This slows down runtime greatly (by having multiple files spread out in the filesystem instead of a single binary file), but it does mean build time is much faster (as you can generate in parallel). You should not use this option.

EXAMPLES
# Create a "en_US" locale using ISO-8859-1 encoding.
# When you set LANG=en_US or LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1, this is used.
en_US ISO-8859-1
# Create a "en_US" locale using UTF-8 encoding.
# When you set LANG=en_US.UTF-8, this is used.
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

SEE ALSO
locale(1), localedef(1), locale-gen(8)

AUTHORS
Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org>
Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>