Using locale -a on debian:

but on centos:

This came about in a bash script I was writing where I had to check if the C.UTF-8 locale existed so I could fallback to en_US.utf8 if not because of distros like arch that don't have UTF-8.

Because I was doing something like locale -a | grep -i UTF-8 it was returning false on centos because over there its called C.utf8 without the dash.

Once I discovered the naming different I was about to account for it in my script... but why the inconsistency? How does this not trip up programs from distro to distro, is there a better way to inspect locales instead of locale -a?

I believe glibc strips any hyphen(s) and converts case before using the specified locale string. If you're writing scripts that act on $LANG, $LC_ALL or one of the other locale related variables it might be wise to follow suit.

As for why the inconsistency exists at all, I have no idea. All I can guess is that as the specifier after the dot represents a codeset and codesets are traditionally written in upper case letters Debian followed suit with the locale names, but Redhat didn't.

The UNIXverse, is full of inconsistencies.