There are good reasons to use LC_ALL=C for certain commands, especially if you want sorting that's stable across different systems. Sometimes you want "aa" to b

There are good reasons to use LC_ALL=C for certain commands, especially if you want sorting that's stable across different systems. Sometimes you want "aa" to be before "b" even though the Norwegian UTF-8 locale puts it after "å" (which comes after "…zæø"): $ echo $'a\naa\nb\nå'| LC_ALL=C sort a aa b å $ echo $'a\naa\nb\nå'| LC_ALL=nn_NO.UTF-8 sort a b å aa Even worse, some characters that are byte-different collate the same: $ echo $'∨\n∧'|LC_ALL=C sort -u ∧ ∨ $ echo $'∨\n∧'|sort -u ∨ Handling Unicode sanely requires understanding some Unicode.