Locale settings for your cron job

Do you get special characters problem when executing your bash script from a cron job?
And does the same script work fine when it is directly executed from the command line?
If yes, continue reading this article!

The reason of this characters problem is probably because of your locale settings.
Indeed, If you try to run the command locale from the command line and from a cron job, you may get different results such as:

From the command line From a cron job

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

LANG=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

As you can see, the cron job is not using UTF-8. That must be the problem!

So the question now is how to change the locale settings for the cron job?
Some people say that you need to add the following environment variables to the crontab entry:

SHELL=/bin/bash
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

But this actually didn’t work for me.

What you can do instead is create (if not already present) the file /etc/environment and add the following line:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The cron process will read this file when it starts, so you need to restart it in order to apply the change:

service cron restart

Hope this will fix your characters problem.

bash, cron, Linux, locale, shell, UTF-8

This entry was posted on 02 Feb 2010, 22:55 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

#1 by weakish on 27 Apr 2010 - 11:50

/etc/environment is deprecated, but cron somehow need it.

Details: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=543895

Quote

#2 by jinhao on 07 May 2010 - 19:30

thx,very useful and clear.

#3 by carlos on 19 Aug 2010 - 15:04

very clear and useful, since /environment is deprecated, man crontab didnt clear enought about setting a real locale settings

#4 by Tiger on 13 Dec 2011 - 09:54

Thank you, one shot in google and my scripts works properly

#5 by Omar Shibli on 05 Jan 2012 - 11:47

Thanks a lot.
p.s. the above “service cron restart” command didn’t work for me, so i tried this instead “/etc/rc.d/init.d/crond restart”.

#6 by smoreau on 05 Jan 2012 - 11:57

Yes, this is perfectly fine to run the command /etc/rc.d/init.d/crond restart instead.
If you want to use the command service cron restart, you would need to install the service tool using the following command:

apt-get install sysvconfig

#7 by Goddchen on 08 Feb 2012 - 11:36

Adding an “export” before the lines in your shell script should do the trick At least it worked for me.

#8 by smoreau on 08 Feb 2012 - 11:55

Thank you for your input Goddchen.

However, I don’t think it is the best solution as you would have to add the “export” command to all your shell scripts.
I prefer to have this problem fixed one for good instead of having to remember to add this command for every script I would create in the future…

#9 by Kaurin on 16 Feb 2012 - 06:00

Thanks for the article! Helped me out with cleaning up my log file for flexget

#10 by David on 15 Jan 2013 - 08:51

Thanks to you, this is very useful.

#11 by ravikant on 29 Jan 2013 - 09:55

many thanks !! solved the problem straight away

#12 by Murat Çorlu on 25 Feb 2013 - 00:48

My crontab suggests using /etc/default/locale file instead of deprecated /etc/environment file:

○ → /etc/init.d/cron restart
/etc/environment has been deprecated for locale information; use /etc/default/locale for LANG=tr_TR.UTF-8 instead … (warning).
/etc/environment has been deprecated for locale information; use /etc/default/locale for LANGUAGE=tr_TR.UTF-8 instead … (warning).
/etc/environment has been deprecated for locale information; use /etc/default/locale for LC_ALL=tr_TR.UTF-8 instead … (warning).
Restarting periodic command scheduler: cron.

#13 by Tarek on 18 Apr 2013 - 17:20

My /etc/default/locale had the correct configuration, but I was still getting this error.

Creating /etc/environment actually fixed it.

Quick way to create /etc/environment or /etc/default/locale with your own (as sudo user):

locale > /etc/environment
or
locale > /etc/default/locale

#14 by pgn674 on 22 Aug 2013 - 18:33

Thank you, this worked on CentOS 5.5. /etc/environment existed, but was empty. The service name on CentOS is crond, by the way.

#15 by Nataraj on 26 Aug 2013 - 09:07

#16 by tagMap on 06 Nov 2013 - 00:25

I tried to put LANG=en_US.UTF-8 inside the script and that did not work. It worked when I made LANG variable a part of the crontab:

* * * * * LANG=en_US.UTF-8 yourscript.sh

#17 by Roman on 08 Feb 2016 - 23:50

Thank you very much. this article helped me a lot

#18 by Ender on 06 Dec 2016 - 19:10

Dude, you are awesome, thanks a LOT!

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