usrsharelocale

usrsharelocale is a common shorthand reference for the locale data stored under the /usr/share/locale directory in many Unix-like operating systems, following the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It serves as a centralized repository of localization data used by libraries and applications to present language-specific content and region-specific formatting.

Structure and contents

Within /usr/share/locale, data is organized by locale identifiers such as en_US.UTF-8, es_ES.UTF-8, fr_FR.UTF-8, and others. Each locale directory contains data categorized by locale facets, including LC_CTYPE (character handling), LC_NUMERIC (numbers and decimal separators), LC_TIME (dates and times), LC_MONETARY, and LC_MESSAGES (translated messages). In addition to formatting and classification data, the directory hosts gettext message catalogs (.mo files) used by programs to display translated text. A locale.alias file may exist to map alternate or legacy locale names to canonical identifiers.

Purpose and use

The data in /usr/share/locale is used by the system libraries (notably glibc) and many applications to perform internationalization and localization. Environment variables such as LANG, LC_ALL, and LC_MESSAGES influence which locale data are chosen. If a requested locale is unavailable, software may fall back to the POSIX/C locale or another available locale.

Generation and maintenance

Locales are typically provided by the operating system or language packs and may be generated or compiled on demand using tools such as localedef or locale-gen. Administrators can enable or generate specific locales through system configuration files (for example, locale.gen or locale settings in /etc/default/locale on various distributions). Some systems also store additional binary locale data in related directories such as /usr/lib/locale.

Overall, /usr/share/locale plays a central role in enabling multilingual and region-aware behavior across the system and its applications.