Locale settings for your cron job

Do you get special characters problem when executing your bash script from a cron job?
And does the same script work fine when it is directly executed from the command line?
If yes, continue reading this article! 😉

The reason of this characters problem is probably because of your locale settings.
Indeed, If you try to run the command locale from the command line and from a cron job, you may get different results such as:

From the command line

From a cron job

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=

LANG=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

As you can see, the cron job is not using UTF-8. That must be the problem! 🙂

So the question now is how to change the locale settings for the cron job?
Some people say that you need to add the following environment variables to the crontab entry:

SHELL=/bin/bash
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

But this actually didn’t work for me. 🙁

What you can do instead is create (if not already present) the file /etc/environment and add the following line:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The cron process will read this file when it starts, so you need to restart it in order to apply the change:

service cron restart

Hope this will fix your characters problem. 😉

bash, cron, Linux, locale, shell, UTF-8

This entry was posted on 02 Feb 2010, 22:55 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

#1 by weakish on 27 Apr 2010 - 11:50

/etc/environment is deprecated, but cron somehow need it. 🙁

Details: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=543895

Quote

#2 by jinhao on 07 May 2010 - 19:30

thx,very useful and clear.

#3 by carlos on 19 Aug 2010 - 15:04

very clear and useful, since /environment is deprecated, man crontab didnt clear enought about setting a real locale settings

#4 by Tiger on 13 Dec 2011 - 09:54

Thank you, one shot in google and my scripts works properly 🙂

#5 by Omar Shibli on 05 Jan 2012 - 11:47

Thanks a lot.
p.s. the above “service cron restart” command didn’t work for me, so i tried this instead “/etc/rc.d/init.d/crond restart”.

#6 by smoreau on 05 Jan 2012 - 11:57

Yes, this is perfectly fine to run the command /etc/rc.d/init.d/crond restart instead.
If you want to use the command service cron restart, you would need to install the service tool using the following command:

apt-get install sysvconfig

#7 by Goddchen on 08 Feb 2012 - 11:36

Adding an “export” before the lines in your shell script should do the trick 🙂 At least it worked for me.

#8 by smoreau on 08 Feb 2012 - 11:55

Thank you for your input Goddchen. 🙂

However, I don’t think it is the best solution as you would have to add the “export” command to all your shell scripts.
I prefer to have this problem fixed one for good instead of having to remember to add this command for every script I would create in the future…

#9 by Kaurin on 16 Feb 2012 - 06:00

Thanks for the article! Helped me out with cleaning up my log file for flexget 🙂

#10 by David on 15 Jan 2013 - 08:51

Thanks to you, this is very useful.

#11 by ravikant on 29 Jan 2013 - 09:55

many thanks !! solved the problem straight away

#12 by Murat Çorlu on 25 Feb 2013 - 00:48

My crontab suggests using /etc/default/locale file instead of deprecated /etc/environment file:

○ → /etc/init.d/cron restart
/etc/environment has been deprecated for locale information; use /etc/default/locale for LANG=tr_TR.UTF-8 instead … (warning).
/etc/environment has been deprecated for locale information; use /etc/default/locale for LANGUAGE=tr_TR.UTF-8 instead … (warning).
/etc/environment has been deprecated for locale information; use /etc/default/locale for LC_ALL=tr_TR.UTF-8 instead … (warning).
Restarting periodic command scheduler: cron.

#13 by Tarek on 18 Apr 2013 - 17:20

My /etc/default/locale had the correct configuration, but I was still getting this error.

Creating /etc/environment actually fixed it.

Quick way to create /etc/environment or /etc/default/locale with your own (as sudo user):

locale > /etc/environment
or
locale > /etc/default/locale

#14 by pgn674 on 22 Aug 2013 - 18:33

Thank you, this worked on CentOS 5.5. /etc/environment existed, but was empty. The service name on CentOS is crond, by the way.

#15 by Nataraj on 26 Aug 2013 - 09:07

#16 by tagMap on 06 Nov 2013 - 00:25

I tried to put LANG=en_US.UTF-8 inside the script and that did not work. It worked when I made LANG variable a part of the crontab:

* * * * * LANG=en_US.UTF-8 yourscript.sh

#17 by Roman on 08 Feb 2016 - 23:50

Thank you very much. this article helped me a lot 🙂

#18 by Ender on 06 Dec 2016 - 19:10

Dude, you are awesome, thanks a LOT!

LogikDevelopment