Re: sleep with LANG="address@hidden"

[Jim Meyering]

Martin Probst <address@hidden> wrote:
> I just encountered a strange behaviour of the "sleep" tool. If the
> language is set to German via something like LANG="address@hidden" it
> gives localized messages which is ok. But it also expects numbers to
> come in the localized format which means for German that fractions
> have to be written like "0,5" and not "0.5". This might seem correct,
> but it breakes a lot of scripts which are usually written for
> English/American locales.

Thanks for reporting that.
However, it's not a problem with sleep.
Sleep should accept numbers in the locale specified by the user.

Scripts that invoke sleep with numbers containing a `.' should
first set the environment variable LC_NUMERIC to `C'.

E.g., in a Bourne shell script,

  LC_NUMERIC=C sleep 0.5

In the mean time, you can work around this by
setting LC_NUMERIC=C in your own environment.