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# Terminal should set LC_CTYPE rather than LANG By default Terminal sets LANG at startup (Preferences → Advanced). The intent here I assume is to get the various shell commands to work with UTF-8, which is great, since file names (and thus `ls` output) are UTF-8 and so is keyboard input. Terminal should however only set LC_CTYPE, there are two reasons why setting LANG is problematic: 1. In some contexts¹ Terminal is unable to obtain a value for language/region and sets LANG to just UTF-8. This does not carry over to LC_CTYPE, which means UTF-8 support does *not* work. To reproduce this go to System Preferences → International → Format and set Region to South Africa. Now open a new Terminal and type “locale”. The values I get are: LANG="UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="C" LC_CTYPE="C" LC_MESSAGES="C" LC_MONETARY="C" LC_NUMERIC="C" LC_TIME="C" LC_ALL= An additional test is: % touch /tmp/æblegrød && ls /tmp/æblegrød /tmp/??blegr??d 2. The language that Terminal obtains (when it works) does not actually match my language preference. I.e. I have English at the top of Languages, but since I customized the Danish formats for dates, Terminal exported LANG as da_DK even though I prefer English output. ¹ Both me and someone I spoke to did a clean install of Leopard and had the default values for Region set to “Custom” which made UTF-8 not work in the Terminal by default.