How to remove system locales, as oppose to package locales as asked in How to remove unnecessary locales?
I'm getting the following errors recently:
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
I have en_US
locale in my system:
$ grep en /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
$ locale -a | grep en
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8
but not en
, as complained by perl
:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_MEASUREMENT = "en",
LC_PAPER = "en",
LC_MONETARY = "en",
LC_NAME = "en",
LC_ADDRESS = "en",
LC_NUMERIC = "en",
LC_TELEPHONE = "en",
LC_IDENTIFICATION = "en",
LC_TIME = "en",
LANG = "C"
So I add the locale en
by:
% locale-gen en
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
en_AG.UTF-8... done
en_AU.UTF-8... done
en_BW.UTF-8... done
en_CA.UTF-8... done
en_DK.UTF-8...^C
I don't want any of above locales (only en_US
), but now I can't get rid of them — I followed the steps in
https://serverfault.com/questions/394610/remove-a-locale-in-ubuntu
But when it comes to the last step, I'm still getting:
% locale-gen
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
en_AG.UTF-8... done
en_AU.UTF-8... done
en_BW.UTF-8... done
en_CA.UTF-8... done
en_DK.UTF-8...^C
How to remove all above locales and keep only en_US
?
Conclusion & Supplement
Thanks to Gunnar's answer, it is indeed caused by entries in /etc/locale.gen
, for those extra locales. Just FTR, this is what locale-gen en
has changed in /etc/locale.gen
:
$ sed '/^#/d; /en/p;' /etc/locale.gen
en_AG UTF-8
en_AG UTF-8
en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_BW.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_BW.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_HK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_HK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IE.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IE.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IL UTF-8
en_IL UTF-8
en_IN UTF-8
en_IN UTF-8
en_NG UTF-8
en_NG UTF-8
en_NZ.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_NZ.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_PH.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_PH.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SC.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SC.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SG.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SG.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZM UTF-8
en_ZM UTF-8
en_ZW.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZW.UTF-8 UTF-8
As a comparison, here is what the default looks like (i.e., without any of the above extra locales):
$ sed '/^#/d;' /etc/locale.gen; echo ---
---
Best Answer
Note: Some of the commands below require root privileges, consider the use of
sudo
.Basic info
According to
man locale-gen
, locales are set in several files.Comprehensive details on locales at the Arch Wiki.
Checking locales and the locale
To check the (already) generated locales, run any of the following commands (with minor output differences).
To check the currently used locale, run any of the following commands (with minor output differences).
Setting and generating (new) locales
Locales are typically set by uncommenting lines in
/etc/locale.gen
, after which runninglocale-gen
is required.This will generate locales files for each uncommented line in
/etc/locale.gen
(and under/var/lib/locales/supported.d/
), whether they were previously generated or not.Alternatively, the command
will uncomment the corresponding line in
locale-gen
while generating the desired locale and only this one.Removing locales
To remove locales in
/etc/locale.gen
, simply comment the desired lines and regenerate the locales usinglocale-gen
. The commandlocale-gen --purge <locale>
doesn't do what the modifier suggests.To remove locales under
/var/lib/locales/supported.d/
is trickier. Since any file/var/lib/locales/supported.d/<code>
depends on the packagelanguage-pack-<code>-base
, any change on the former will be restored when the latter is updated.Workaround. To prevent changes under
/var/lib/locales/supported.d/
, set files in it with the "immutable (i)" attribute. So instead of removing files, empty them. For instance:Setting the locale
Setting and generating locales does not set the system locale. Any of the following commands achieves this.