Setting the Java locale from Linux

We got new servers at work, and since none of the original team is left,we were puzzled as to why some non-ASCII characters in our Java logs showed up as gibberish, and why Java had trouble opening files with non-ASCII names dynamically.

To clear up the situation:

1. Check the locale on the server with the current locale (this is the same as echo $LANG). Make sure that there is no conflict between that and the encoding of your shell or file names. You can check the current encoding on the server with locale charmap, and the one of your shell is probably defined in your terminal, for example in PuTTY under “Configuration > Window > Translation > Character set”.

2. If the locale is incorrect, check the available locales and charsets using locale -a, you can even define your own.

3. Most importantly, if you have made any change, reboot. In case of doubt, reboot! Out IT team had made the change but had not performed a reboot, so it took us hours to understand why Java was not picking up the locale. It did, it’s just Linux that was still using the old one.