Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 109011
/etc/profile.d/less.csh crashes if LANG is unset
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:59:06 EDT
Description of problem: The less.csh doesn't work if neither LANG nor LC_ALL is set. tcsh says LANG: unset variable and skips .cshrc (that is why I marked this bug with Severity:high). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): less-378-11.1 The less.csh/less.sh scripts should be reviewed. Neither of them thinks about the case that both LANG and LC_ALL are unset. (bash just is not that sensitive to crash on it.) And both less.sh and less.csh leave a variable in the environment: LANGVAR. Sorry, I've no patch, I've just deleted that section as I don't use jp nor ko characters.
less-378-11.1 is in the Fedora 1 release, so the ticket owner may want to change the product field of this ticket from rawhide to fedora. i've got a specially tailored minimal install, so i may have stumbled into this by not having a package that normal fedora installs would. is there some package / install step that's supposed to set LANG?
You're asked during the installation which language you'd like to install in. This selection is then written to /etc/sysconfig/i18n. At startup of tcsh, bash... the file /etc/profile.d/lang.[c]sh gets executed and reads in and sets LANG. As it is impossible to skip the language selection or to deinstall the initscripts package (which provides /etc/profile.d/lang.[c]sh), I can only come to the conclusion that something in your system is hosed. Please check that the mentioned files are installed and that LANG is set in /etc/sysconfig/i18n.
Sure, my configuration is strange, I've manually edited /etc/sysconfig/i18n to unset LANG. (I'll explain below.) But I think the script should not crash in this case. A simple ``if ($?LANG || $?LC_ALL)'' enclosing the code would do; if someone unsets LANG, they are on their own, but why crash? And the script should end with ``unsetenv LANGVAR''; less.sh should end with unset LANGENV. The explanation why I have unset LANG: my users want LANG=C and ``man'' doesn't work with it (I've filed another bug report); so I unset LANG.
Created attachment 95932 [details] proposed less.csh I've had the opportunity to do some research. IEEE Std 1003.1 defines LANG, LC_ALL, et. al. It also defines behavior in the absence of LANG: "4. If the LANG environment variable is not set or is set to the empty string, the implementation-defined default locale shall be used." ref: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html#tag_08_02 as recently as 378-7, less.csh behaves gracefully in the absence of LANG. It does appear that simply wrapping the entire LANGVAR section with ``if ($?LANG || $?LC_ALL)'' would address the problem. As for unsetting LANGVAR at the end of less.csh, it appears that using ``set LANGVAR'' instead of ``setenv LANGVAR'' would address this issue. A proposed less.csh is attached.
Created attachment 95972 [details] proposed less.sh The less.sh script should also unset LANGVAR.
the current package doesn't support JLESSCHARSET anymore, the whole LANG stuff from the scripts can be removed