I need to make a decision regarding whether a complicated commercial program that I work on should assume a particular terminal encoding for Linux, or instead read it from the terminal (and if so, how).It's pretty easy to guess which system and terminal encodings are most common on Windows. We can assume that most users configure these through the Control Panel, and that, for instance, their terminal encoding, which is usually non-Unicode, can be easily predicted from the standard configuration for that language/country. (For instance, on a US English machine, it will be OEM-437, while on a Russian machine, it will be OEM-866.)But it's not clear to me how most users configure their system and terminal encodings on Linux. The savvy ones who often need to use non-ASCII characters probably use a UTF-8 encoding. But what proportion of Linux users fall into that category?Nor is it clear which method most users use to configure their locale: changing the LANG environment variable, or something else.A related question would be how Linux configures these by default. My own Linux machine at work (actually a virtual Debian 5 machine that runs via VMWare Player on my Windows machine) is set up by default to use a US-ASCII terminal encoding. However, I'm not sure whether that was set up by administrators at my workplace or that's the setting out of the box.Please understand that I'm not looking for answers to Which encoding do you personally use? but rather some means by which I could figure out the distribution of encodings that Linux users are likely to be using.
Which terminal encodings are default on Linux, and which are most common?
character encoding