4 ms·

> Those tools are supposed to act locale specific. Another response mentioned decimal points. In a locale that uses a decimal comma, how does (for example) gre

• theamk 4y ago
  Luckily, this does not matter for most tools -- for "grep", ASCII 46 is nether decimal point nor full-stop, it is "match any" character. "sort" is commonly used with non-number data (filenames, ISO dates) or with integer values (file sizes), and most uses of "find" can avoid floating point entirely (use -mmin instead of-mtime). And since both "expr" and bash's "$((...))" don't work on non-integer data, there is a great incentive to avoid floating point in shell scripts. And yes, sometimes you have no choice but to care about locales, maybe you are pulling data from badly designed API or parsing files generated by someone who didn't know about "stat -c" and did "ls -l" instead. But I'd argue that in this case you should be explicit about setting locale env, and you shouldn't rely on system settings. It's not like an API will suddenly start returning different data if you move your fetching script to a machine with a different locale.