how to set export LANG=en_US.utf-8 on screen terminal start (screenrc doesn't work)

Mia Cox | March 04, 2026

If I don't use screen

$ locale
LANG=en_US.utf-8

If I use screen

$ locale
LANG=C

how can I tell screen to use LANG=en_US.utf-8 so I can display unicode properly.

I tried screen -U but that didn't change anything.

1 Answer

If you are using bash as your default shell, put the following line into your .bashrc file inside your home folder:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8