When you assign an environment variable immediately before executing a command, the variable is effectively exported in the command's environment, but doesn't affect the parent environment. From man bash:
The environment for any simple command or function may be augmented temporarily by prefixing it with parameter assignments, as described above in PARAMETERS. These assignment statements affect only the environment seen by that command.
So what's happening in this initscript is that the LANG
variable, set to whatever you've configured HTTPD_LANG
to be (in this case "C"), is getting exported into the daemon
command's environment (and presumably from there into the httpd's environment).