One thing I'm wondering about is what text encoding the program should use to output. I tend to write scripts that output exclusively in UTF-8, but I realise th

One thing I'm wondering about is what text encoding the program should use to output. I tend to write scripts that output exclusively in UTF-8, but I realise this might not be a given. (And, of course, the user's terminal expected encoding setting doesn't necessarily mean that files should be written in that encoding.) Presumably, you would ideally output text in whatever encoding is specified by the LANG environment variable, but this seems like something that only comes with full i18n/l10n support, since it also specifies the actual language to use. Are there any actual established guidelines on this?