Arch Linux

my64

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-12-30

Posts: 88

[solved] <80><90> caracters with man page

When doing a man on a page, I  get sometimes <80><90> in the text:

I checked locales, TERM shell variable, various terminal emulator (xterm,urxvt), but did not find the right way to fix this.
Any advice  ?
Thanks

Last edited by my64 (2009-08-06 22:12:39)

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: [solved] <80><90> caracters with man page

My locale output looks like this:

LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=

Are you using bash, zsh or perhaps a different shell?

On an ubuntu forum, someone suggested adding "export LC_ALL=C" to .bashrc.  This would override all the other language settings.

Last edited by thisoldman (2009-08-04 23:08:22)

my64

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-12-30

Posts: 88

Re: [solved] <80><90> caracters with man page

just tried with

LC_ALL=C

The problem is still here.
Note also that I am running under fluxbox.

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: [solved] <80><90> caracters with man page

My thoughts, in random order.

Change your fonts and see if the problem persists.

The characters "-" + "\n" (hyphen + newline) in your manpages are being replaced by "[m" + "\n" + "<80><90>" + \"n". The replacement characters look suspiciously like garbled escaped color code characters in a bash script.

Does the problem occur in a tty? If it does, then the problem is probably in a bash profile or .bashrc. Does it occur after switching to root with "su -" and then running man? If not, then it's probably one of the config files in ~/.

If you decide it's a bash problem, you could replace your current .bashrc with a plain vanilla one and see if that fixes the man page display. If it does, add back your old .bashrc modifications one by one until the problem reoccurs.

The problem could be in a gtkrc file. Have you tried changing themes?

You could also run locale-gen and regenerate your language packages. Or reinstall glibc and then run locale-gen.

I hope one of these suggested avenues works to help you find the display problem source.

scio

Member

From: Buffalo, NY

Registered: 2008-08-05

Posts: 366

Re: [solved] <80><90> caracters with man page

I believe this is .bashrc related since I have seen the same thing in RHEL 5 with konsole and bash for some users.  I will see if I can track down the .bashrc for anything suspicious.

Edit: I found the answer for the ones I saw.  In the .bashrc there was the line:

export LESSCHARSET='latin1'

Since PAGER was set to less, this caused less to ignore system charset settings and use latin1.  So I would check your .bashrc for exports relating to charset and your PAGER.  Hope this helps.

Last edited by scio (2009-08-06 15:23:16)

my64

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-12-30

Posts: 88

Re: [solved] <80><90> caracters with man page

Thank you scio and  thisoldman, you helped me a lot!
The  solution is very simple, I added in .bashrc:

unset LESSCHARSET

and it solved the problem, no more <80><90>.
Thanks.
Olivier