Solving Perl Language Locale Problem

When working in bioinformatics, you will almost certainly run into the perl locale error, which looks like this.

Worse yet, this error persists every time a perl script is called, which will lead to your terminal being flooded with this warning message.

You could just ignore it, but it can become annoying very quickly.

Quickfix

Using the example image above, the problem lies in the LC_all variable being unset.

export LC_ALL="en_HK.UTF-8"

sets the LC_ALL variable to the corresponding locale. In this case, it’s en_HK.UTF-8.

Note: this is a temporary fix and will reset everytime you restart your shell

A more “permanent” fix for this would be to set the environmental variable.

Assuming you are inside your conda environment that is facing this issue, run:

conda env config vars set LC_ALL="en_HK.UTF-8"

This will ensure the locale is set everytime you activate the environment and fix the warning message.

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