Xjyuk

How to remove system locales, as oppose to package locales as asked in How to remove unnecessary locales?

I'm getting the following errors recently:

locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

I have en_US locale in my system:

$ grep en /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

$ locale -a | grep en
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8

but not en, as complained by perl:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
 LANGUAGE = "",
 LC_ALL = (unset),
 LC_MEASUREMENT = "en",
 LC_PAPER = "en",
 LC_MONETARY = "en",
 LC_NAME = "en",
 LC_ADDRESS = "en",
 LC_NUMERIC = "en",
 LC_TELEPHONE = "en",
 LC_IDENTIFICATION = "en",
 LC_TIME = "en",
 LANG = "C"

So I add the locale en by:

% locale-gen en
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
 en_AG.UTF-8... done
 en_AU.UTF-8... done
 en_BW.UTF-8... done
 en_CA.UTF-8... done
 en_DK.UTF-8...^C

I don't want any of above locales (only en_US), but now I can't get rid of them -- I followed the steps in
https://serverfault.com/questions/394610/remove-a-locale-in-ubuntu

But when it comes to the last step, I'm still getting:

% locale-gen
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
 en_AG.UTF-8... done
 en_AU.UTF-8... done
 en_BW.UTF-8... done
 en_CA.UTF-8... done
 en_DK.UTF-8...^C

How to remove all above locales and keep only en_US?

Conclusion & Supplement

Thanks to Gunnar's answer, it is indeed caused by entries in /etc/locale.gen, for those extra locales. Just FTR, this is what locale-gen en has changed in /etc/locale.gen:

$ sed '/^#/d; /en/p;' /etc/locale.gen


en_AG UTF-8
en_AG UTF-8
en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_BW.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_BW.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_HK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_HK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IE.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IE.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IL UTF-8
en_IL UTF-8
en_IN UTF-8
en_IN UTF-8
en_NG UTF-8
en_NG UTF-8
en_NZ.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_NZ.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_PH.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_PH.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SC.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SC.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SG.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_SG.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZM UTF-8
en_ZM UTF-8
en_ZW.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_ZW.UTF-8 UTF-8

As a comparison, here is what the default looks like (i.e., without any of the above extra locales):

$ sed '/^#/d;' /etc/locale.gen; echo ---


---

You should edit /etc/locale.gen and comment the locales you don't want. Then run

sudo locale-gen

There does not exist any locale with the name en. The one you probably want to use is en_US.UTF-8 and not en_US. (The latter enables latin1 encoding.)