locale-gen with purge does not work

Question

I use the --purge option to remove existing locales before generating new one, but seems cannot remove existing locales?

e.g.

# locale-gen --purge en_US
# locale -a
C
en_AG
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_US
en_US.utf8
POSIX
zh_TW

@Sacx Since he tagged it Ubuntu, I would assume that is th edistro he's using. — Juice, Jun 18 '14 at 15:53

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 20 '14 at 05:55

9

Clean /usr/lib/locale/ (delete everything, do a backup if you are afraid).
Delete unneeded locale from /etc/default/locale file (do not delete this file, edit and delete the locales)
Delete unneeded locale from /var/lib/locales/supported.d/* files (do not delete this files, edit them and delete the locales)
Regenerate locales (locale-gen --purge).

Also you can try localepurge as Juice sad earlier.

answered Jun 20 '14 at 05:55

Sacx

It also works if instead of #4 you execute `dpkg-reconfigure locales`. – lepe Aug 30 '17 at 09:25

Juice · Answer 2 · 2014-06-23T14:43:49.010

2

sudo edit /etc/default/locale

Edit the LANGUAGE variable to remove whatever language that needs removed. Then reboot.

sudo apt-get install localepurge

After that you can run localepurge to remove old locale files.

edited Jun 23 '14 at 14:43

answered Jun 18 '14 at 14:12

Juice

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 19 '14 at 12:16

1

Sure? you have run it as root or using sudo:

sudo locale-gen --purge en_US

Because it doesn't raise any error if you run it as regular user

answered Jun 19 '14 at 12:16

user.dz

score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 31 '18 at 18:43

-1

Just do the following command if it is Ubuntu 18.04:

sudo apt-get purge -y language-pack-en-base

answered Oct 31 '18 at 18:43

mja

4 Answers4