Locale and encoding

cheat sheet · Ubuntu 24.04 https://lab.dimsanych.ru/en/wiki/locale/

Cheat sheet

locale current settings
locale -a available locales
sudo locale-gen ru_RU.UTF-8 generate one
sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 system default (or localectl set-locale)
export LC_ALL=C stable output in scripts
LC_ALL=C sort file a one-off byte-order sort
localectl status the systemd view

Configuration

bash

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 ru_RU.UTF-8   # generate locales
sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8       # the system default locale (/etc/default/locale)
# temporarily, for the current session:
export LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8

localectl status                  # the system locale (systemd)
sudo localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales     # interactive picker (Debian/Ubuntu)

Precedence: LC_ALL (overrides everything) > specific LC_* variables > LANG (the general default).

Variable	Affects
`LANG`	the general default for all categories
`LC_CTYPE`	encoding (UTF-8!)
`LC_TIME`	date/time format (see date)
`LC_NUMERIC`	the decimal separator (. or ,)
`LC_COLLATE`	sort order (`sort`)
`LC_ALL`	overrides everything (for scripts: `LC_ALL=C`)