language settings
 

hi

Is there a method of making the shell understanding others languages just like a desktop can or is it english only ???

Hi,

It depends what you mean by "understanding other languages", so what do you want to do exactly? Please be more specific. And which shell are you using?

IF it can understand french , spanish , greek, hindi, chinese , japanese,......

Sorry, I still do not understand your question.

If you speak about the console, it is utf-8 able by default in all recent kernels so it should accept any utf-8 charset. But ou course the outcome depends on the keyboard map and the font you use.

Other than that, the abilities of a shell depends on which one you use: is it sh, csh, bash, dash, ksh?

By itself the shell 'understand' a command as long as that command complies to its syntax.

Now if you speak about the ability to accept input and do output using specific locales, it depend on the locale settings at the system and user levels, as well as the kind of terminal you use and the interpreter you invoke, so it is really difficult to give general answer to such a question.

You will get more on-spot answers if you word your question in a more specific way. For instance, which distribution do you use, are you speaking about using the console or a virtual terminal under X (and which one in the latter case: xterm, rxvt, urxvt, konsole, terminal, ...) and which interpreter do you use?

localization
 

I asking about Internationalization and localization stuff and NLS (National Language Support or Native Language Support).


for example I'm using a french customized OS,
instead of using the head command I would like to write tete
or vrai in place of true
and qui for who

and more interestingly
बुद्धि instead of using the head command in hindi


that would be a console that's more integrated with its environment.


I started to customized bash to create aliases to replace some words but it seems a daunting job to rename all of my 4659 commands.

Don't know whether this will help:

http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:localization

Unfortunately, programming languages don't come in different natural languages. If you look up Bash (or C) in Wikipedia in various languages, you'll see that everyone has to use "do ... done" or "mkdir". Computer programming has always been done in English: the Anglo-Saxons got there first!