Use an UTF locale when using AWS CLI on Unix/Linux

There are AWS strings which can be coded in Unicode. These are at least EC2 tags and volume tags.

Unix/Linux scripts which will run as super user will most likely run in the C locale.

The C locale is an ASCII 7 bit locale which doesn't support Unicode characters. The Python run time which gets used by the AWS CLI will throw an error message because it can't convert Unicode characters.

The simplest way to avoid this error is to start any script using AWS CLI with a set locale like:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Here is an example on how to reproduce the error:

MYPROFILE=default
INSTANCE=i-1234567890
REG=us-east-1
echo " I am in locale:"
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
locale
echo "*******"
aws ec2 create-tags --profile $MYPROFILE --region $REG --resources $INSTANCE --tags Key=Unicodetest,Value=SchöneScheiße
aws --profile $MYPROFILE ec2 describe-instances --region $REG  --instance-ids $INSTANCE
echo "*******"
echo " I am in locale:"
export LC_ALL=C
locale
echo "*******"
aws ec2 create-tags --profile $MYPROFILE --region $REG --resources $INSTANCE --tags Key=Unicodetest,Value=SchöneScheiße
aws --profile $MYPROFILE ec2 describe-instances --region $REG  --instance-ids $INSTANCE
echo "*******"

The error message looks like:

ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 25: ordinal not in range(128)

This error is annoying since administrators may add Unicode strings in their browser at any point of time. Commands like describe-instance which dump all information about an instance are going to fail.