Starting with HTCondor 8.8, =condor_ssh_to_job= and hence also interactive jobs use an =sshd= running directly on the execute node with user privileges. Since 8.8.10, most issue have been ironed out, and
connecting into the job happens using =condor_nsenter=, which is an =nsenter= -like tool to "enter" container namespaces in a generic way. This tool is spawned by the =starter= in parallel to =sshd=.
-There are a few remaining issues related to X11 forwarding which can be worked around, and which are partially dependent on the utilised setup. These are discussed on this page.
+There are a few remaining issues related to X11 forwarding which can be worked around, and which are partially dependent on the utilised setup. These are discussed on this page in addition to a short discussion of the handling of =locale= environment variables.
{subsection:X11 forwarding}
X11 forwarding in general works by running =xauth= as a child of the =sshd= process on the execute node. =sshd= mostly prunes the environment before, setting a new DISPLAY variable to a forwarded X11 port. It then runs =xauth= which by default uses the user's home directory to store the X11 authorization information.
@@ -117,3 +117,9 @@
{endverbatim}
----
Note that we can not =SetEnv= the variable =XAUTHORITY= directly with =SetEnv=, it is overwritten by =sshd= after setting the defined environment variables.
+
+{subsection:Locale settings}
+You may note that the =locale= environment variables (=LANGUAGE=, =LANG=,...) are not "adopted" in the interactive job or when using =condor_ssh_to_job= to attach to a running job, similar as is the case with =DISPLAY= and =TERM=. This may cause issues such as UTF-8 not working if the default locale inside your job is not set, e.g. because you are using a container without a default locale, which usually means the =C= locale is assumed.
+
+While forwarding such variables is convenient in regular =ssh? usage, it would change the behaviour of the payload of the interactive job versus a batch job. This is especially true e.g. for =LC_NUMERIC= which affects the way some libraries parse numbers.
+To overcome this kind of issue, the best approach seems to be to set a default locale inside the used container, which is then consistently used both for batch and interactive jobs.
