[arch-general] Line Drawing Characters

[David N Murray]

On 11/14/2015 11:35 AM, Zorro wrote:
> Op 14-11-2015 om 17:10 schreef David N Murray:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've built several machines by installing Arch from scratch. 
>> Recently, I built a Linode VM using their Arch image, dated 2015-08.  
>> From there, I did a normal `pacman -Syu` to update the system.  My 
>> problem is probably trivial, annoying, and I haven't been able to 
>> figure it out.  I'm hoping someone can give me a hint on where to 
>> look.  I've been through the post-install docs and can't figure out 
>> what might be causing this.
>>
>> The machine I'm on is running xfce and I'm using xfce4-terminal 
>> 0.6.3.  If I do something like `systemctl status`, I see output that 
>> is mostly ascii characters: * on the first line next to the name of 
>> the host, pipe (|) next to each line in the CGroup.  If I ssh into 
>> another local machine, I see the same thing.
>>
>> My problem is on the Linode box.  When I ssh there and run the same 
>> command, I'm seeing garbage where I see pipes next to each line in 
>> the CGroup output.  I don't know if this is going to paste properly, 
>> but I'll try:
>>
>> Local:
>>    CGroup: /
>>            |-init.scope
>>
>> Linode:
>>    CGroup: /
>>            ├─init.scope
>>
>> On the linode box, those 2 characters actually occupy 6 characters in 
>> the output and the last 5 characters are each drawn in a box and 
>> overwrite the first character of the process name.  All the 
>> characters appear as "garbage."
>>
>> What's really strange is that the output from `top` is fine, and that 
>> appears to use some graphics and color.
>>
>> Has anyone seen something like this?  All sessions have the same TERM 
>> variable (xterm).  This is an area of any Linux I've never spent much 
>> time.  It always just worked out-of-the-box (for any distro I've ever 
>> used).  The only thing I can think of at this point is to try and 
>> diff the two systems' /etc directories and see if I can track it down 
>> that way.  Maybe that's next.
>>
>> TIA,
>> Dave
>>
>
> Maybe you can check the LANG setting?
>
> I have LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and TERM=xterm-utf8.
> Changing LANG=en_US on my system changes the drawn lines in the output 
> of systemctl status into pipelines.
>
> Regards,
> Harm-Jan Zwinderman
>
> Cebuned.svipr.nl/Cebuned.html

Thanks for the tip on /etc/vconsole.conf Don.  My local machines don't 
have one.  The Linode box contents are:
KEYMAP=us
FONT=
FONT_MAP=

Harm-Jan, you nailed it.  On my local box LANG=en_US, on the Linode 
LANG=en_US.UTF-8.  When I switch the encoding in the xfce terminal to 
Unicode/UTF-8 I get the actual line drawing characters (which look even 
better than the pipe, dash (|-) that I'm used to seeing).

Thanks!
Dave