Re: Strange characters in systemd-cgls output

[Greg KH]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 05:17:44AM -0700, John Ky wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I typed systemd-cgls at the shell prompt and got a bunch of weird characters.
> Why does this happen?
>
> If it is relevant, I'm running this from MacOS in iTerm.

That's probably the issue, it works here for me in other terminals, on
Linux.

> core@ip-10-0-0-14 ~/devenv-staging $ systemd-cgls
> <E2><94><94><E2><94><80>system.slice
> <E2><94><9C><E2><94><80>1 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd noswap cros_legacy
> <E2><94><9C><E2><94><80>fleet.service

It thinks your terminal can handle extended characters, so it doesn't
fall back to "7-bit" characters. Make sure your terminal emulation mode
is set properly, or perhaps try some other osx terminal program?

sorry,

greg k-h

[Donald Endres]

I see the same symptom on a coreos AMI with no modifications. 

I get the same output from ubuntu terminal as well as iterm2 and terminal app on mac

UTF-8 seems to display fine:

# echo -e "\xE2\x98\xA0"

☠

but the output of systemd-cgls does not:

# systemd-cgls

<E2><94><9C><E2><94><80>1 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd...

[Donald Endres]

Setting LANG environment variable allowed systemd-cgls to display as expected.

$ locale -a

C

POSIX

$ export LANG=POSIX

$ systemd-cgls 

|-1 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd...

[Michael Marineau]

The issue here was that in the absence of a locale to say otherwise
systemd defaults to UTF-8 while less defaults to latin1/iso8859. This
should be fixed in recent images which switch less to UTF-8 via an
environment variable.

[Darren Shepherd]

This is fixed in the alpha images already.  It was fixed by setting LESSCHARSET=utf-8 in /etc/env.d

Darren