#572378 xfce4-terminal: terminal is unusable after cat'ing a non-ascii character from an otherwise plain-text file

Package:
libvte9
Source:
vte
Description:
Terminal emulator widget for GTK+ 2.0 - runtime files
Submitter:
"Jordan Metzmeier"
Date:
2010-04-21 20:48:16 UTC
Severity:
normal
#572378#5
Date:
2010-03-03 19:56:08 UTC
From:
To:
We had a user with a failed login attempt on one of our servers using non-ascii characters for the username. When xfce4-terminal tries to 'cat' the file, the terminal becomes unusable. The behavior is the same as if you tried to 'cat' a binary file.

I am reporting this as a bug because both xterm on my Debian Lenny machine, xfce4-terminal on 0.4.8 on my Pentoo testing VM, and putty all do not show this behavior.

The backport depends shown below are left over from when I tested the xfce4-terminal from lenny-backports. The xfce4-terminal was tested on this issue with both the regular depends from Lenny, as well as the depends from Lenny-backports.

I can not include the entire file but I can include the offending line:

Mar  2 16:50:53 psc login[7508]: FAILED LOGIN 1 FROM PC-ortize FOR 0001, Authentication failure
#572378#10
Date:
2010-03-03 21:09:52 UTC
From:
To:
I can display this message correctly in mutt, so it's at least not
reproducible on recent enough xfce4-terminal. I'll try to reproduce on
unstable too, but in the meantime, could you try to reproduce using
another vte-based terminal (like gnome-terminal)?

Cheers,
#572378#15
Date:
2010-04-20 17:46:21 UTC
From:
To:
First off, sorry it has taken me so long to follow-up on this bug
report. Apparently either a misconfiguration in my system's MTA or a
misunderstanding of what reportbugs --email option did has appended my
hostname onto the email address in the From: field. For this reason, I
did not get an email when you replied to the bug report. I ran into
another case recently where non-ascii chars caused issues with my
terminal, so I decided to checkup on the bug.

When I view the file in a pager such as /usr/bin/less or
/usr/bin/most, I can see the non-ascii chars as: ^Y^O^L^A0001^N.

I have tested this on gnome-terminal, xterm, rxvt, and rxvt-unicode.
gnome-terminal also has the same behavior but xterm and rxvt does not.

I am going to attach a snippet of the actual file, as well as a
screenshot of the terminal so you can see exactly what harm it causes.
In the screenshot you can see how text is printed fine prior to the
characters but all text after is not.

Thanks,
#572378#20
Date:
2010-04-21 20:43:48 UTC
From:
To:
reassign 572378 libvte9
thanks

It might depend on the shell too (I can't reproduce in xfce4-terminal
and zsh). It's usually a bad idea to output binary characters to the
shell, anyway.

You can type “reset” to try to regain a working Terminal.

I'm reassigning to libvte because it's on the terminal widget, but I'm
not sure there's anything which can be done about it.

Cheers,