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8.6 Environment Variables

LANG

Provides a default value for the internationalisation variables that are unset or null.

LC_ALL

If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalisation variables.

LC_COLLATE

The POSIX standard specifies that this variable affects the pattern matching to be used for the ‘-name’ option. GNU find uses the GNU version of the fnmatch library function.

This variable also affects the interpretation of the response to -ok; while the LC_MESSAGES variable selects the actual pattern used to interpret the response to -ok, the interpretation of any bracket expressions in the pattern will be affected by the LC_COLLATE variable.

LC_CTYPE

This variable affects the treatment of character classes used in regular expression and with the ‘-name’ test, if the fnmatch function supports this.

This variable also affects the interpretation of any character classes in the regular expressions used to interpret the response to the prompt issued by -ok. The LC_CTYPE environment variable will also affect which characters are considered to be unprintable when filenames are printed (see Unusual Characters in File Names).

LC_MESSAGES

Determines the locale to be used for internationalised messages, including the interpretation of the response to the prompt made by the -ok action.

NLSPATH

Determines the location of the internationalisation message catalogues.

PATH

Affects the directories which are searched to find the executables invoked by ‘-exec’, ‘-execdir’ ‘-ok’ and ‘-okdir’. If the PATH environment variable includes the current directory (by explicitly including ‘.’ or by having an empty element), and the find command line includes ‘-execdir’ or ‘-okdir’, find will refuse to run. See Security Considerations, for a more detailed discussion of security matters.

POSIXLY_CORRECT

Determines the block size used by ‘-ls’ and ‘-fls’. If POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, blocks are units of 512 bytes. Otherwise they are units of 1024 bytes.

Setting this variable also turns off warning messages (that is, implies ‘-nowarn’) by default, because POSIX requires that apart from the output for ‘-ok’, all messages printed on stderr are diagnostics and must result in a non-zero exit status.

When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, the response to the prompt made by the -ok action is interpreted according to the system’s message catalogue, as opposed to according to find’s own message translations.

TZ

Affects the time zone used for some of the time-related format directives of ‘-printf’ and ‘-fprintf’.