ggambetta
ggambetta

Reputation: 3433

Selecting message language in gcc and g++

I use gcc/g++ on Linux and since my install is in Spanish (my native language), gcc prints warnings and errors in Spanish. I would rather read them in English for two reasons:

  1. English messages are far easier to google.
  2. Spanish translations are more or less horrible.

Any help?

Upvotes: 35

Views: 16911

Answers (3)

PerseP
PerseP

Reputation: 1197

To change the gcc translations to English, to must set the environment variable LANG to English:

$ export LANG=en

add it to your .profile file and it will always be in English

Upvotes: 5

Johannes Schaub - litb
Johannes Schaub - litb

Reputation: 507105

The end of the GCC manpage contains an overview of its locale environment variables:

  • LANG
  • LC_CTYPE
  • LC_MESSAGES
  • LC_ALL

These environment variables control the way that GCC uses localization information that allow GCC to work with different national conventions. GCC inspects the locale categories LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES if it has been configured to do so. These locale categories can be set to any value supported by your installation. A typical value is en_GB.UTF-8 for English in the United Kingdom encoded in UTF-8.

The LC_CTYPE environment variable specifies character classification. GCC uses it to determine the character boundaries in a string; this is needed for some multibyte encodings that contain quote and escape characters that would otherwise be interpreted as a string end or escape.

The LC_MESSAGES environment variable specifies the language to use in diagnostic messages.

If the LC_ALL environment variable is set, it overrides the value of LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES; otherwise, LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES default to the value of the LANG environment variable. If none of these variables are set, GCC defaults to traditional C English behavior.

I do this:

LC_MESSAGES=C gcc-command-here

Upvotes: 20

Bastien Léonard
Bastien Léonard

Reputation: 61753

Try to change the LANG environment variable: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.4.0/gcc/Environment-Variables.html#Environment-Variables.

Upvotes: 19

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