If I open an rxvt window or xterm, which for me defaults to LANG=C, and do echo < foo
instead of getting bash: foo: No such file or directory I get bash: foo: ?????????????????????? If I set LANG to en_GB, it doesn't help. If I set LC_MESSAGES to en_GB, I then get the proper error message. If I then unset LC_MESSAGES, I continue to get a proper error message (so maybe a caching issue?) At the Linux console, I get a proper error message regardless. What is going on here? I'm using Debian unstable, but this issue has existed for a long time and is started to annoy me. Thanks, Neil. FWIW a typical "env" when getting the '?' is as follows: PWD=/home/neil COLORFGBG=15;0 WINDOWID=35651586 PAGER=jless HOSTNAME=monkey LESSCLOSE=/usr/bin/lesspipe '%s' '%s' LESSOPEN=| /usr/bin/lesspipe '%s' LV=-Or LESS=-M USER=neil MACHTYPE=i386-pc-linux-gnu [EMAIL PROTECTED] EDITOR=vi LANG=C COLORTERM=rxvt DISPLAY=:0.0 SSH_AGENT_PID=9701 SHLVL=1 LOGNAME=neil PERL_BADLANG=0 SHELL=/bin/bash HOSTTYPE=i386 OSTYPE=linux-gnu SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-XX0QUFpi/agent.9667 TERM=rxvt HOME=/home/neil PATH=/home/neil/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games JLESSCHARSET=latin1 OUTPUT_CHARSET=ISO8859-1 _=/usr/bin/env