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I'm trying to generate locales, but locale-gen (localedef?) segfaults.

# sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
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_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
/bin/bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
Generating locales...
  en_US.ISO-8859-1... /usr/sbin/locale-gen: line 177: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
/usr/sbin/locale-gen: line 243:  3809 Segmentation fault      localedef $no_archive -i $input -c -f $charset $locale_alias $locale
failed
  en_US.UTF-8... /usr/sbin/locale-gen: line 177: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
/usr/sbin/locale-gen: line 243:  3836 Segmentation fault      localedef $no_archive -i $input -c -f $charset $locale_alias $locale
failed
Generation complete.

In top I see localedef -i en_US -c -f ISO-8859-1 en_US taking up 8000G of virtual memory, then some huge number without even G suffix and then segfault.

System has 1G memory and 512MB SWAP, but memory is barely used (130MB at peak of generation).

System data:

root@docs:~# uname -a
Linux docs 2.6.32-042stab078.28 #1 SMP Mon Jul 8 10:17:22 MSK 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

root@docs:~# cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS"

root@docs:~# dpkg-query --show glibc*
glibc-2.13-1
glibc-doc

root@docs:~# sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
...skipped...
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
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1 Answer 1

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1

It looks like you have these lines in your /etc/default/locale file:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The LC_CTYPE setting is wrong, since "UTF-8" is not a valid locale name. Also, it makes no sense to set all those variables; I would recommend that you simply remove the LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE lines.

(I saw something similar recently. It would be interesting to know how that LC_CTYPE=UTF-8 statement ended up there in the first place.)

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  • Actually I have only those: LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    – Slava N
    Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 16:29
  • Setting LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 and then sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8, then sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales helped! Thanks!
    – Slava N
    Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 16:34
  • Oops, was running commands on wrong machine. Setting LC_CTYPE explicitly didn't help, still segfault :(
    – Slava N
    Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 16:38
  • Don't bother with locale-gen and dpkg-reconfigure. Your problem is that LC_CTYPE is incorrectly set somewhere, apparently somewhere else but /etc/default/locale. Maybe some of your config files in $HOME contains the incorrect statement, such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile.
    – Gunnar Hjalmarsson
    Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 20:10

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