Weird characters in sysout/syserr

[Annihilannic]

Red Hat came back with a response to a bug I raised about the problem described in this thread from July last year:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1559410&page=6

The problem was that I was seeing strange characters such as the following on man pages:

       --color[=WHEN]
              control  whether  color is used to distinguish file types.  WHEN
              may be [red]â[/red]never[red]â[/red], [red]â[/red]always[red]â[/red], or [red]â[/red]auto[red]â[/red]

The explanation was simple, the system was set up to use the UTF-8 character set (LANG=en_US.UTF-8), but my terminal software, in this case PuTTY, was set up to handle the default of ISO8859-1. Changing this to UTF-8, which I wasn't even aware I could do, fixes the problem.

Alternatively you can change the system's default character set or override it in your profile, but I think that would be a step backwards.

Now the man pages and C compiler output look fine:

$ gcc garbage.c
garbage.c:1: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ at end of input

(You can't see it in the fonts used on tek-tips, but those quotes are matching opening and closing pairs.)

I'm also having Tek-Tips Forums management send member ejaggers a note so he sees this post from the issue raised last year.

Annihilannic.