LANG is always local, ignores ~/.profile

Question

In my ~/.profile, I have:

export LANG=C.UTF-8

I think that was the Ubuntu default.

However, when I start a shell (e.g. Konsole), I get:

gz@gcomputer:~$ echo $LANG
de_DE.UTF-8

Even when I change my ~/.profile to export LANG=en_US.UTF-8, I don't get a difference.

Why? How can I fix this?

Answer 1

According to this answer You should change language settings in etc/default/locale and ~/.pam_environment, not in ~/.profile

etc/default/locale is generated by update-locale so you do this to set LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 (the file also sets LANGUAGE)

update-locale LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

In ~/.pam_environment language settings look the same as in /etc/default/locale:

LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

and can be edited as desired. You have to log out and back in or use source:

In general you have to log out and log back in for changes made to ~/.profile to take effect.

However, you can make them instant using source

source ~/.profile

Example:

I edit my ~/.profile to include:

export foo=bar

save and exit...

in a new shell:

$ echo $foo

(nothing)

$ source ~/.profile
$ echo $foo
bar

If nothing changed after logging out and back in, check that ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bash_login do not exist (because, as mentioned by @ByteCommander, if they do exist, ~/.profile is not sourced)

If either do exist, the best thing to do is probably to copy any commands from them into your ~/.profile and rename them something like ~/.bash_profile_old and ~/.bash_login_old, so that ~/.profile gets sourced (and you are not depending on bash being your shell)

If neither of them exist, it may be that ~/.profile is still not getting sourced for some reason:

See Eliah Kagan's answer here for more detail

The suggested workaround is to use... ~/.pam_environment

Answer 2

For reasons too tedious to get into here, bash has several per-user configuration files. The most important two are .profile and .bashrc. Bash reads one or the other of them on every startup, but not both, depending on conditions which are too confusing for me to bother remembering.

What I do instead is put everything meaningful in .profile, plus an extra line reading

profile_loaded=t

and then I have a .bashrc consisting just of

if test -z "$profile_loaded"; then
    . ~/.profile
fi

If you adopt this approach, it is important to make sure that everything .profile does is idempotent, which is a fancy word for "doing this more than once is the same as doing it only once. One easy way to accomplish that is to wrap the entire contents of .profile in a similar conditional:

if test -z "$profile_loaded"; then

    # ... all the actual work goes here ...

    profile_loaded=t
fi

(If you have files named .bash_profile or .bash_login, that confuses the issue further: I strongly recommend copying their contents into .profile, deleting them, and then cleaning up any duplication in .profile.)