Whether I must restart the server after changed /etc/rc.config.d/LANG?

[MA Qiang]

I have changed 'export LANG=zh_CN.hp15CN' to 'export LANG' in /etc/rc.config.d/LANG.

If I do not restart the server, what will happen with my applications such as oracle, hp ovo agent, and so on.

Thank you!

[Alex Lavrov. · Accepted solution]

This file defines the environment variable LANG. There are programs, like swagent, that use this file to set this variable when they are started. When you change it after those programs are started, they will still use the old value. You can check with "grep LANG /sbin/init.d/*" what programs use it and restart them, but there are maybe other that still use it.

If I was you, I would restart the server, just to make sure that everything works fine after the change and there will be no surprises at the next reboot.

[Steven E. Protter]

You probably can avoid a restart on a 24/7 system, but its much more efficient in terms of sysadmin time to simply restart the system.

Those applications will all have to be restarted manually anyway.

SEP

[Amit Agarwal_1]

You just need to restart those applications. If you don't restart the application they might misbehave. For example:
Let's say the old LANG was set to Japanese, and you have switched to Chinese. It is a fact that some characters in some language are considered invalid in other language.

Your application, not yet restarted, still assumes that all the characters that it reads/write would be Japanese. It would treat Chinese chars as invalid chars, and depending on the implementation it might misbehave or shut down or print error message, which you are not expecting.

So necessary and sufficient condition is to restart all the application that supports multibyte environment.

[MA Qiang]

Thanks!