Posts Tagged locale
Relation between TortoiseSVN and locale
The other day, I got stuck on a problem with TortoiseSVN for about half a day! 😯
Yes, I know, it is a pretty long time to get a simple subversion client working…
The error I was continuously getting was:
Network connection closed unexpectedly
Nothing else! Nothing in the log files on both the client and the server. 🙁
The funny thing is that it was working perfectly fine using a command line client or even Eclipse Subversive.
After a (too) long time of investigation, I noticed that I was getting the following warnings when I was running the following command line directly on the server:
$ svn list svn+ssh://smoreau@localhost/data/svn/ svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8 svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct smoreau@localhost's password: svnserve: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale svnserve: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8 svnserve: warning: please check that your locale name is correct branches/ tags/ trunk/
Actually, any svn command was triggering the warning messages:
$ svn info svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8 svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct
Could it possibly be related with my TortoiseSVN problem?
Because I didn’t have any other idea, I decided to give it a go. 😉
It appears that these warning messages came from a configuration problem around the locale package on the server. Indeed, look what we get if we run the locale command:
$ locale -a 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 locale: Cannot set LC_COLLATE to default locale: No such file or directory C POSIX
After some more investigation, it looks like this problem appeared when I upgraded the version of the locale package via APT. 😕
Once again, I asked my friend Google to help me out. It suggested me the following solutions:
- Run
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8– Didn’t work - Run
update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8– Didn’t work - Run
dpkg-reconfigure locales– WORKED 😀
In conclusion, I wasn’t able to use TortoiseSVN because of a configuration problem on the locale package after an upgrade… Does it make sense? 🙄
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. 😉
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