Sets the process's locale to C rather than whatever the system's default is (if the process is locale-aware, as "C" is the default locale for C programs). The main change[0] for this case is to also disable encoding (and thus decoding), all text is considered to be ASCII rather than whatever the locale specifies (usually UTF8 these days)

[0] the locale should have an impact on what character ranges match. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6799872/how-to-make-grep-... for an example