---
title: Linux locale problems over ssh from a Mac
author: james
type: post
date: 2011-10-06T08:07:16+00:00
url: /2011/10/linux-locale-problems-over-ssh-from-a-mac/
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categories:
  - Debian
  - Hacks
  - Ubuntu

---
Most users of Debian/Ubuntu have at some time seen these annoying messages:

`<br />
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.<br />
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:<br />
	LANGUAGE = (unset),<br />
	LC_ALL = (unset),<br />
	LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",<br />
	LANG = "en_GB.UTF-8"<br />
    are supported and installed on your system.<br />
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").<br />
` 

There are a variety of causes &#8211; usually locales not being generated properly or incorrect environment variables.

Lately I&#8217;ve been getting these a lot of these, but only some of the time. After some messing around I eventually discovered the problem wasn&#8217;t on the server itself. The problem only occurs when I&#8217;m logged in over SSH from a Mac. The default sshd on Debian **copies LANG and LC_* variables** from the client. The LC_CTYPE variable was set on my Mac, apparently by default, to &#8220;UTF-8&#8221;. While this seems to work on MacOS X, it&#8217;s not a valid value for Linux.

The easiest solution was just to add the following to my ~/.profile on the Mac:

`<br />
export LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8<br />
` 

That fixes it, and doesn&#8217;t appear to cause harm on the Mac.