How can I uninstall a locale via command-line?

Question

I have 5 unused locales on my system. How can I remove them via command line? I have use localepurge but it didn't work.

Answer 1

You can list locales with

localedef --list-archive

or with

locale -a

Corresponding file size is given by

ls -lh /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive

To remove unused locales you can do

sudo locale-gen --purge it_IT.UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8 && echo 'Success!'

where it_IT.UTF-8 and en_US.UTF-8 are the only two locales I want. The && echo 'Success!' at end is useful because locale-gen does not report errors if an unavailable or wrong locale is passed on command line.