Cmdtool woes
Charles Lindsey
the 'dtterm' provided is the most useless terminal emulator I have ever
encountered (which is not to say that 'cmdtool' is perfect, but by
comparison ...).
Anyway, I recently discovered a brain-deadedness of cmdtool that I had not
been aware of before. My version of Openwindows appears to be 3.6.1, which
comes with Solaris 7.
Now it is well known that you may set LANG to the locale of your choice,
but it is still possible to set LC_CTYPE, LC_TIME, LC_MESSAGES and all
the rest to something different. So, although I have set LANG=en_GB, the
LC_TIME that comes with en_GB is a mess, so I have set it to a specially
constructed locale in all the proper places (/etc/.login, /etc/profile).
However, having set up this environment, if you call 'cmdtool' (whether
from some command line, or invoking the corresponding action from the
background-menu or whatever else, 'cmdtool' appears to look at your LANG,
and then it sets all the others to match before invoking your $SHELL (or
whatever other command you specified). Note that I have carefully
refrained from setting LC_ALL.
It didn't used to be like this, and I have got around it by recompiling
cmdtool.c from some source dated 1993 (that would be version 3.1, or
thereabouts).
But why on earth did they do this, and is there any way the current version
can be configured to turn it off?
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: c...@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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