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I have been going through some logs for my Flexget instance and saw that I was getting a number of these messages coming up:

Your cron environment has different filesystem encoding (ANSI_X3.4-1968) 
        compared to your terminal environment (UTF-8).

Oh dear, well sure enough, it is different but there is a really easy way to sort it:

Firstly, let’s take a look at how it is different:

Terminal:

chris@q2server:~$ locale
        LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
        LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
        LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
        LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
        LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
        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=

Cron:

LANG="POSIX"
        LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
        LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
        LC_TIME="POSIX"
        LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
        LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
        "LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
        LC_PAPER="POSIX"
        LC_NAME="POSIX"
        LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
        LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
        LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
        LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
        LC_ALL=

Thank fully there is an odd, but easy solution. Even though apparently the /etc/environment file is now redundant this is where the solution goes. Simply add the following line to the file:

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

Once you have done that then all you need to do is restart your cron process:

sudo service cron restart

Then you get messages that look like this:

2011-11-26 00:00 INFO     log_once
        Good! Your crontab environment seems to be same as terminal.

Much better!