localization - Selecting message language in gcc and g++

Question

I use gcc/g++ on Linux and since my install is in Spanish (my native language), gcc prints warnings and errors in Spanish. I would rather read them in English for two reasons:

1. English messages are far easier to google.
2. Spanish translations are more or less horrible.

Any help?

Answer 1

The end of the GCC manpage contains an overview of its locale environment variables:

• LANG
• LC_CTYPE
• LC_MESSAGES
• LC_ALL

These environment variables control the way that GCC uses localization information that allow GCC to work with different national conventions. GCC inspects the locale categories LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES if it has been configured to do so. These locale categories can be set to any value supported by your installation. A typical value is en_GB.UTF-8 for English in the United Kingdom encoded in UTF-8.

The LC_CTYPE environment variable specifies character classification. GCC uses it to determine the character boundaries in a string; this is needed for some multibyte encodings that contain quote and escape characters that would otherwise be interpreted as a string end or escape.

The LC_MESSAGES environment variable specifies the language to use in diagnostic messages.

If the LC_ALL environment variable is set, it overrides the value of LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES; otherwise, LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES default to the value of the LANG environment variable. If none of these variables are set, GCC defaults to traditional C English behavior.

I do this:

LC_MESSAGES=C gcc-command-here