[ILUG] [TOTD] querying the locale database

[P at draigBrady.com]

There is a very useful database of "country" specific
information, located on all linux systems.
For e.g. if one wants to lookup the international
telephone prefix for France, you do:

LANG=fr_FR locale int_prefix

I have found it difficult to interact with this
locale database though. In the above example
how does one know how to specify the record (fr_FR)
or to select the field (int_prefix). so...


To list the fields available, do:

locale | cut -d= -f1 | xargs locale -kc | less


To list the records (countries) available, do:

locale -a |
grep _ | #don't show nationalities
grep -Ev '[.@]' | #ignore diffent charmaps
while read lang; do
     echo -n "$lang "; LANG=$lang locale territory
done |
sort -k2

Pádraig.