command line applications don't handle accented characters well

[James Wilkinson]

Paul Tomblin wrote:
> Before "upgrading" to Fedora Core 3 from RedHat 9,
> termcap/terminfo/ncurses applications handled accented characters
> well.  But now, they're a mish-mash.

I suggested:
> It sounds like you've got UTF-8 issues.
> 
> The SSH protocol doesn't really have support for different character
> sets on either end. Can you check what LANG and LC_ are on the various
> boxes?

Paul replied:
> Oh, well spotted sir!  On the RedHat 9 box, LANG is set to "en_US",
> and on the Fedora box it's set to "en_US.UTF8".  If I do the command
> "LANG=en_US mutt", it displays everything right.
> 
> Should I just blindly force the LANG environment variable to en_US in
> my .profile, or is there a better way to configure this on a system
> wide basis?

This is set in /etc/sysconfig/i18n . It can be over-ridden on a per-user
basis by ~/.i18n : the script /etc/profile.d/lang.sh (or .csh) is run by
each shell on startup and does the heavy lifting.

At some point, however, you might want to switch everything back to
UTF-8, at least for internal purposes. It is seriously nice having
French and Greek and Hebrew and weird symbols Just Working, and makes
reading an international list much more pleasant.

Hope this helps,

James.

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