Fixer Wrappers

localefix : a wrapper for overriding environment variables, written to handle LANG, LANGUAGE and those matching LC_*.

systemwrap : a wrapper for replacing system("... &") with the corresponding fork/exec.

These are both intended for situations where the offending program isn't fixable for whatever reason.

Compilation

Requirements:

• make (usually GNU make)
• A GNU99-conformant C compiler (usually gcc or clang)

To compile, just run make.

If building on i386 or amd64, this will build two copies of each library, one for each architecture. You're probably going to want both. You can override this behaviour with make SINGLEARCH=1.

If you want to run tests, make run-tests.

Installation

Depends on where you're installing.

make install

make install DESTDIR=foo

The libraries will be installed in a directory named for the architecture triplet, e.g. /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu.

localefix

This is intended for recalcitrant programs which limit you to a "blessed" set of locales & languages which don't include yours, potentially causing problems with the likes of date formats..

It consists of a wrapper script and one or more shared libraries (which will be loaded via LD_PRELOAD).

It alters the initial values of LANG, LANGUAGE and the other locale variables (names beginning with LC_) if needed.

It intercepts setenv and putenv to override considered-bad values.

The replacement locale also enforces encoding (at present; this may change).

Rationale

Its reason for being is to work around Steam's game-specific configuration, particularly the fact that if you want English, you get American English instead.

Steam is a lot better with things like date formats these days, choosing neutral (if not ideal) formats for them. However, things can break where it offers game-specific choice of language: that's when it sets variables such as LC_MESSAGES.

There's some variation here, but basically it boils down to some software offering languages which Steam doesn't but not fully handling it: there may be use of functions which get their locale data from an incompletely-configured environment (external configuration), leading to lookups being done for a language (or language variant) other than for which the software is configured via its own means (internally).

I always select English (UK) where the option is offered but I may get mm/dd/yyyy or, worse, a mix of date formats. This is why localefix's defaults are what they are: it's what I need, and (so far as I know) it's the common case of wrong date format.

Usage

[ENVIRONMENT] localefix PROGRAM [ARGS...]_

Environment

• _LC_BAD - target locale without encoding
• _LC_GOOD - replacement locale with optional encoding (use * as the encoding to retain the original)

Defaults

_LC_BAD=en_US
_LC_GOOD=en_GB.*

Matching

Matching of _LC_BAD ignores encodings: the default will match en_US, en_US.UTF-8, en_US.ISO8859-15 etc.

_LC_BAD=en_US and _LC_GOOD=en_GB.* will keep whatever encoding was used for en_US (including none), e.g. en_US.ISO8859-15 will give en_GB.ISO8859-15.

systemwrap

Simple wrapper for handling certain calls to system() for avoidance of security bugs. It is only triggered when the command to be executed has at least one parameter and is backgrounded: it will parse the command string and use fork and exec instead.

⚠ This will break some correct use of system(), so only use it where you definitely need it.

It contains an overly-simplified command line tokeniser which does the following:

• strips out redirection, piping, && and ||;
• stops at and traps backgrounding;
• handles string quoting and escapes (without failures);
• blindly copies everything else as plain text

with the following aims:

• handle improperly or incompletely escaped command lines;
• prevent backgrounding of the task (for error reporting).

Usage

[ENVIRONMENT] systemwrap PROGRAM [ARGS...]_