How do you set a locale non-interactively on Debian/Ubuntu?

Question

Usually, I run aptitude -y install locales then dpkg-reconfigure locales to set up locale.

Now I want to put it into a shell script, how can I reliably do the following, automatically / non-interactively?

Choose en_US.UTF-8 and set it as system default
Disable all other locales
(Optional) Verify if /etc/default/locale contains one-and-only entry of LANG=en_US.UTF-8 as expected

Stone · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-23 07:16:47Z

up vote 1 down vote accepted

See locale-gen:

 locale-gen --purge en_US.UTF-8

and

 echo -e 'LANG="en_US.UTF-8"\nLANGUAGE="en_US:en"\n' > /etc/default/locale

answered Feb 23 '12 at 7:16

Stone
3,529220

	Thanks, but I'm getting `File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/ALChacks.py", line 32, in <module> sys.stderr.write(_("Can't set locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct!\n"))`... – kenn Feb 23 '12 at 8:02
	Try LANG=en_US.UTF-8 locale-gen --purge en_US.UTF-8 – Stone Feb 23 '12 at 9:36
	This morning, with a clean state of VM, it worked! Thanks! – kenn Feb 23 '12 at 19:30

1 Answer