Setting Your Locale in Ubuntu

When programming or even running certain applications, have you ever received these or similar error messages?

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory

Yea, I love the error too. 😏
Luckily, there’s a simple fix:

See which locale’s you have

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

As you can see in my example above, my locale’s are set to en_US.UTF-8, which is my desired setting. But what if they were not? How do I fix this error?

Time to fix things

$ sudo local-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.

And that should get you where you need to be.

linux locale ubuntu

See also