What environment variable affects the "charset" variable?

[Cameron Simpson]

On 08Jul2019 12:30, Jon LaBadie <mutter at jgcomp.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 05:53:22AM -0500, Peng Yu wrote:
>> `mutt -D` prints 'charset="iso-8859-1"' when it runs in a
>> non-interactive bash session scheduled by crontab.
>>
>> But the same command prints 'charset="utf-8"' when it runs in an
>> interactive bash session. I suspect that this is affected by an
>> environment variable.
>>
>> Does anybody know why there is such a difference?
>
>Processes run by cron do not mimic your login environment.
>If you need specific things set that are typically set in
>.profile etc., you need to set them in your crontab file
>or the executed script.

You can wire basic environment variables into the crontab. The usual 
example is the MAILTO environment variable or a basic PATH, but you can 
easily set locale relevant variables as well.

The "locale" command reports the current (computed) locale settings.  
Here's mine just now:

    % locale
    LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
    LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
    LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8
    LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_COLLATE=C
    LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
    LC_ALL=

My only actual environment variables are these:

    LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
    LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
    LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8

You could put something equivalent in your crontab.

See "man locale" and also the other manual entries referenced in its SEE 
ALSO section at the bottom.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>