wsl.exe --help option garbles output when piped to more

[henrik-jensen]

• Your Windows build number: (Type ver at a Windows Command Prompt)

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18362.295]

• What you're doing and what's happening:

Start cmd.exe prompt

c:\> wsl --help | more

Result - every char is postfixed with newline it seams:

• What's wrong / what should be happening instead:

Readable (more) paged output expected.

PS!
This is not a console issue. It's the wsl.exe --help option only, outputting extra (newline?) chars.
e.g. c:\> wsl ls --help | more works fine.
PS!!
Tested with both c:\> chcp 850 (default on my system) and c:\> chcp 65001, unicode output. Same result.

[henrik-jensen]

Brute workaround (working on my system win 10 1903 danish ):

c:\>wsl --help | wsl tr -d '\000\015' | more

but of course that seems quite fragile though.

The format that 'wsl --help' spits out seems to be some bastard kind of utf16LE but where every '\r\n' becomes '\r\r\n'.
So the above effectively creates a UTF8 with unix line ends output, but will only work on ascii text.

[therealkenc]

Interesting report. Yep there is an extra \r in there alright. For the giggles I created a UTF16LE file with VS Code (I never touch the stuff personally) and System32\more.com does eat it correctly. So wsl.exe's output does appear to be malformed.

Alternative work-around below. I set my Windows system locale to Chinese with the new fangled Windows Terminal v0.4.2382.0 preview.

C:>wsl --help | wsl iconv -c -f utf16 -t utf8 | more

Seems to take believe it or not:

No word on whether that text makes any sense (I believe it may not) but it does match the non-more output.

[henrik-jensen]

@therealkenc - Excellent, using the right tool for the job. Much better and robust workaround, also works in the standard (old) console (The one used when calling cmd.exe, what's its name? ).

[therealkenc]

Windows Console (vs newspeak Windows Terminal). Yes those words are synonyms but they had to call it something.

I found with wide characters like Chinese the (scare quote) "old" Windows Console mangled some glyphs. I just tried Windows Terminal on a lark. Western-ish charsets will possibly be fine in both. Can't speak to Danish, lolz.

[NotTheDr01ds]

Really the same root cause as #4607, for which a workaround is available starting with release 0.64.0. I've confirmed that setting $env:WSL_UTF8=1 (or the equivalent in other shells) causes wsl --help | more to display correctly.

For those who aren't able to upgrade to Windows 11 at this time, the workaround in this comment by falloutphil should also work.

[microsoft-github-policy-service]

This issue has been automatically closed since it has not had any activity for the past year. If you're still experiencing this issue please re-file this as a new issue or feature request.

Thank you!