Terminal in OS X Lion: can't write åäö on remote machine

Question

Can't type åäö on the command line when ssh'ing to a Debian machine. It works locally though.

Changing 'Declare terminal as' to 'xterm-color' doesn't seem to help, either.

Answer 1

Edit /etc/ssh_config and comment out the line:

SendEnv LANG LC_*

This config change was introduced by Lion. See man ssh_config for more information on SendEnv.

Another alternative may be to modify the machines you're accessing, as described in grawity's answer.

A related thread on this topic: http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=189

Answer 2

Make sure the remote machine has correct locale settings:

1. the value of $LANG (or $LC_CTYPE) should be an UTF-8 locale (en_US.utf-8 for example); on Debian, the default value is set in /etc/default/locale

2. the chosen locale should be listed in locale -a – if not, edit /etc/locale.gen and run locale-gen.

Answer 3

I had to comment out the line SendEnv LANG LC_* in /etc/ssh_config on a clean install of OS X Lion in order to get åäö to work on remote machines.

Just to make Google users happy: many of you probably want to configure this to make Irssi on remote servers work with special characters like åäö on Mac OS X Lion.

Answer 4

Or even easier, you can uncheck the "Set locale environment variables on startup" setting in Terminal.app under Settings Windows > Settings Tab > Advanced and restart Terminal.app

Answer 5

I have added:

LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=POSIX

in .bash_profile located in my home folder.