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I have a Ubuntu system on which current locale is(output of locale command):

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

I want to change it to en_GB, because some characters are not handled properly on the terminal display.

What is the command to change the locale?

What is the command to see what different locales are available on current system for me to set/try?

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2
  • IMO, switching away from UTF-8 is never a solution. I've had my last name mangled one time too many.
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Jul 28, 2011 at 17:47
  • What terminal are you using? most of the X11 terminal emulators support utf-8, and utf-8 is the new unix standard.
    – ctrl-alt-delor
    Commented Jan 8, 2014 at 15:19

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The used locale is set via environment variables for the process (like the shell running in your terminal).

Most of the time it is sufficient to just change LANG, assuming you use bash

$ export LANG=en_GB

Put this into your ~/.profile file to make it work for all (even non-terminal) processes.

You can have a look at /usr/share/locale/ for some list of locales.

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4
  • Thanks. But when I was trying to set my locale to POSIX, but could not see any entry like 'POSIX' in /usr/share/locale file.
    – goldenmean
    Commented Jul 28, 2011 at 14:36
  • Try C for LANG.
    – Benjamin Bannier
    Commented Jul 28, 2011 at 14:37
  • You saved my life. Thank you
    – obayhan
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 12:47
  • LANG might be ignored, if LC_ALL or any of the other LC_* variables are set which are listed in "man 7 locale"
    – jimav
    Commented Jul 11 at 18:12
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You could also use locale -a to get a list of available locales on your system (in addition to /usr/share/locale/, there may be some found in /usr/lib/locale/. For setting the locale, there's also the command setlocale, but I never got that to work and used export as the user honk described.

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