On 21 December 2011 11:26, STINNER Victor <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
> I never checked which locale is used by default for programs called by cron. So I checked: on Fedora 16, programs start with a very few environment variables, and LANG and LC_ALL are not set. You can add "LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8" (for example) to /etc/environment to set the default language for the whole system (for all programs). I checked, it works with cron. Or if you don't want to affect all programs, it is maybe safer to only set the locale for one specific program in your crontab by adding "LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 " before you command. Example:
>
> * *  *  *  * LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 /home/haypo/test.sh

That is the correct kind of configuration.  When I say it scales
poorly I mean that every user running a Python program on a unicode
system needs to insert this configuration in every relevant place, and
they need to work this out from what is typically a fairly cryptic
message.  (bzr just added a workaround for this, but for other
programs it still exists.)

Also, my other point, is that people may very well want their cron
scripts to send ascii output but cope with unicode filenames.