Remi Bergsma's blog

I’ve had some trouble when using the Mac OSX Terminal app for some time now. Until today, it just gave me some annoying warnings from time to time. Like when installing an application with apt-get in Debian:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_CTYPE = “UTF-8”,
LANG = “en_US.UTF-8”
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale (“C”).
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

It did work, so nothing too serious. I’ve also found applications, like iotop for example, that refuses to start when LC_ALL was unset. But a quick

EXPORT LC_ALL=$LANG

made the application start, so I didn’t take the time to investigate it further. Today I run into a more serious issue that cost me quite some time to figure out.

I had stopped the pure-ftpd deamon to do some maintenance and then started it again. It did start without error, but connecting failed:

server:~# ftp ftp.server.nl
Connected to ftp.server.nl.
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
ftp>

Nothing had changed in the ftp configuration. After some debugging and trial & error, I found out that when I started the deamon from within a shell on Ubuntu it worked, but when I started it within a shell on my MacBook, it didn’t.

When looking at the locales I found:

server:~# locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=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=

Notice the two errors at the top. I talked to a colleague about this and he suggested looking at the Terminal app settings. There I found a setting called “Set locale environment variables on startup” which was activated. The setting is located in Preferences | Settings | Advanced. I’ve unchecked the button now as you can see in this screenshot:

When closing the Terminal app, and reopening it again, I tried again:

server:~# 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=

No more errors! I tried restarting the pure-ftpd deamon from my Terminal app and it now works as expected. Even the warnings and errors when installing applications in Debian (apt-get) are gone. In fact, it seems this is the way it is supposed to work.

Glad I’ve fixed this 🙂

Update: As Reza mentions in the comments, it’s also possible to fix this problem on the server side. This is the best way to go if you want to fix this for your users. Thanks Reza!