Description of problem: If a user changes the current locale at the terminal by changing one of the locale environment variables, those changes are lost in a new shell and the system-wide defaults are substituted. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): initscripts-8.45.17.EL-1.el5.centos.1 (CentOS 5.1) How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1. export LANG=xx 2. bash 3. echo Should be xx: $LANG Actual results: Should be xx: en_CA.UTF-8 Expected results: Should be xx: xx Additional info: This problem is solved in at least one other distribution by renaming the "sourced" environment variable in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh to LC_SOURCED and exporting it so that the /etc/sysconfig/i18n file is only ever read in once.
This is fixed in the development tree, and will be in RHEL 6. I'm leery of changing this behavior in a RHEL update for earlier releases, so I don't think this will be backported at this time.