Apr 8 2011

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale

By Colin • Subversion • 0

After settings up a new Ubuntu 10.10 webserver I started getting these messages while using subversion.

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_GB.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

They seemed not to affect the subversion commands i was runnng but are just a bit annoying. After the normal google skills download I came across the Ubuntu page on locales. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale.

I used the local -a command to list the installed locales which gave me.
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

As you can see the locale en_GB.UTF-8 is not listed so the solution was to to generate the locale files for en_GB.UFT-8 using the command locale-gen. So for my locale of en_GB i used:
locale-gen en_GB.UTF-8

Another locale -a gave me
C
en_GB.utf8
POSIX

Bingo!