Why does gcc have “â” in all its error messages?

Question

For some reason, my installation of gcc seems to be printing an \"a with a carat\" character in place of all %s\'s in its error messages, e.g.,

test.c:4: err         


        

Answer 1

What is your LANG-Settings (call "export" on a bash in a terminal)? Try setting the Lang to a correct value like

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

using

declare -x LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

This seems to be a charset-problem, so perhaps you want to double-check using the right one.

Answer 2

Aha! The problem was that I have LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and was using xterm. Apparently, that's no good. By setting LANG=C or LANG=en_US, everything's great now.

Answer 3

Seems like madness to me, but I just wanted to put in that you may be able to Google for it more easily by calling the ^ a circumflex, which is what it's usually called when used as an accent.