I was setting up Huginn on FreeBSD, I needed to do some manual testings of commands before I automate them, one of them was using twurl to Tweet. When I was trying to tweet in Armenian, the terminal prompt was giving me a bell. I realized that I needed to change the locale.

When I opened another shell to change the locale, FreeBSD’s fortune printed the following:

In order to support national characters for European languages in tools like
less without creating other nationalisation aspects, set the environment
variable LC_ALL to 'en_US.UTF-8'.

Ah, thank you!

By the way, if you ever saw a fortune that you liked and you needed it later, but didn’t remember the details, you can do fortune -m pattern freebsd-tips, here’s an example:

% fortune -m USB freebsd-tips
%% (freebsd-tips)
If you need to create a FAT32 formatted USB thumb drive, find out its devicename
running dmesg(8) after inserting it. Then create an MBR schema, a single slice and
format it:

# gpart create -s MBR ${devicename}
# gpart add -t fat32 ${devicename}
# newfs_msdos -F 32 -L thumbdrive ${devicename}s1

                -- Lars Engels <lme@FreeBSD.org>

Cheers.