Joseph Rosevear <
Ma...@joeslife.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2022 22:06:10 +0200, Aragorn wrote:
>
>> On 13.10.2022 at 19:54, Joseph Rosevear scribbled:
>
>>> [snip]
>
>>> Can anyone explain what happened? I don't fully understand it, and it
>>> is just complex enough to leave me bamboozled.
>>
>> I'm not running Slackware, but given how much time has elapsed since the
>> previous release of Slackware ? which is the one I suspect you would
>> have created your script for ? and the one you're running now,
>> my money would be on Slackware having in the meantime adopted UTF-8 as
>> the default character encoding [*], whereas the previous release would
>> still have been using the US-centric ISO-8859-1 character encoding.
>>
>>
>> [*] As just about every other distribution already did almost two
>> decades ago. :p
>
>
> Still I would welcome explanations that shed light on what happened
> regarding my script.
I agree with Aragorn, this looks like what happens when UTF-8 encoded
text is viewed using a single byte encoding.
As to what went wrong, I'd guess this line to be the cause:
export LESSCHARSET=latin1
That would likely end up resulting in less using the ISO-8859-1
character set, even if the rest of the environment is utf-8, and if so,
the results would likely be just what you saw.
Try experimenting with and without that setting and see if it is the
cause.