Using this in my "~/.profile": export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 Yields this: $ Rscript -e 'print(9)' During startup - Warning message: Setting LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 failed [1] 9 This is confusing as the exact same environment works fine with other languages: $ python3 -c 'print(9)' 9 $ ruby -e 'puts 9' 9