Knowledge Base Overview

If you read a manual in Linux, known as man pages, you might see some weird, strange characters. You are even able to identify some of this garbled text as an apostrophe (single quote character).

You may also be able to pin this problem to the character set but what is the correct charset?

Default language

The character set, i.e. how text has to be printed/shown, is defined by the language setting. In Linux this is defined with the environment variable LANG.

[user@host ~]$ set | grep -i lang

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Although this looks perfectly fine it is in fact our problem.

The language should be only en_US or maybe whatever your preferred language is. The appendix UTF-8 throws certain characters off in your man pages and the apostrophe is usually one character you see a lot—or actually you don't see it.

Export en_US

So, all you have to do is set export LANG=en_US as the language.