A shell script that sorts a list of names produces one order on a developer's German desktop and a different order on the build server. The two machines differ only in their locale settings. Which locale category governs the order sort produces?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 107. Administrative tasks medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct LC_COLLATE
Correct. LC_COLLATE defines the collation sequence, which is what sort, comparison operators in the shell and range expressions in glob patterns follow.
Not correct LC_CTYPE
Wrong for ordering. LC_CTYPE classifies characters: which are letters, which are upper or lower case, how multibyte sequences are interpreted. It affects tools such as tr and grep's character classes, not the sort order.
Not correct LC_NUMERIC
Wrong. LC_NUMERIC controls the decimal separator and thousands grouping used when numbers are formatted and parsed.
Not correct LC_MESSAGES
Wrong. LC_MESSAGES selects the language of program messages and the local yes/no response patterns.
Why
The C or POSIX locale collates strictly by byte value, so uppercase letters all precede lowercase ones; most UTF-8 locales instead use a dictionary-style order that ignores case and folds accented letters next to their base letter. Scripts that depend on a stable order should set LC_ALL=C for the command in question rather than trusting whatever the caller's environment happens to be.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page locale(7)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 107 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- The account alice already belongs to the supplementary groups audio and video. You must additionally put her in the group developers while keeping her existing memberships. Which command does that? machine-checked
- A departing employee's account bob must be deleted together with his home directory and mail spool. Which command does all of that in one step? machine-checked
- You want every newly created account to start with a company-standard .bashrc already in its home directory. Where do you place that file? machine-checked
- On a host whose accounts come partly from local files and partly from a directory service, `grep alice /etc/passwd` returns nothing even though `id alice` works. Which command shows alice's account entry the way the system itself resolves it? machine-checked
- Policy says passwords must be changed at least every 90 days, and the account carol must comply. Which command sets that maximum password age? machine-checked
- A line in /etc/group reads `developers:x:1500:alice,bob`. What does the final field contain? machine-checked