Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!hp-pcd!hpfcso!hpfcdc!rer From: rer@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Rob Robason) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: nls cat files? Message-ID: <5570426@hpfcdc.HP.COM> Date: 31 May 90 16:00:04 GMT References: Organization: HP Ft. Collins, Co. Lines: 49 steve> We have many french speaking users, so I though, what a good steve> idea. steve> Then, since most of the other Unix man pages claimed to know steve> about the LANG environment variable, I started trying other steve> commands. Basically, they all kept using english. steve> After a little more looking around I found the /usr/lib/nls steve> directory. It has a directory "C" that contains many cat files, steve> for most of the normal unix commands. Right next to this steve> directory is the "french" directory, but it is basically empty. steve> So my questions are, am I missing some files? or is HP missing steve> some of my $'s? or is this vaporware? Under french (or c-french for Canadian French) you'll find only those files which have generic information in them like date formatting and collation (sort) order. You find commands like date and sort work correctly, as well as functions like strcmp(). The job of going through all of our commands and translating every possible user error or interaction message into 25 langauges is too big for our small (mostly english speaking) commands section to pull off, though. It's possible that some of our intercontinental divisions, which leverage NLS heavily may be providing some of these translations, but I don't know if that is happening. In the absence of an ls.cat file under french, the ls command will use the C language message or the built-in string if C is unavailable. You can easily (given patience and knowledge of French) create your own message catalogs for LANG=french by doing a dumpmsg on a C message catalog into a file, translating the text to the appropriate French wording, then running gencat to produce the catalog under french. Some of our lab engineers had fun a few years ago creating the language LANG=hackerspeak which produced all sorts of obtuse and insulting remarks in place of the polite C messages. This was a fun exercise, but too tedious to carry out fully for all commands or for 25 languages. Perhaps the advent of OSF will precipitate generation of all these language catalogs that we need. NLS is not vaporware: the commands really do have the ability to respond to LANG settings by reading the available message catalogs, but all the data is not there (yet) and I don't know when it will be. Rob Robason Caveat: this is definitely my own stuff, and reflects a very limited view of the world. It would be presumptious to think that this represented the views or position of HP.