Foreign characters won't display in SSH

Question

I'm having some problems with using ssh and a remote server (which I do not have admin access to) - Specifically, there are a couple of folders on there with Korean and Cyrillic text.

When I display the parent folder contents with ls, the characters are escaped as "?". Perhaps of note is that the Korean characters seem to escape far more ?s than the number of characters that should be there.

I know that the terminal program I'm using can display the characters, as using sftp displays them perfectly. The problem occurs across all terminals I've tried.

Summary of machines

Local machine:

• Linux 2.6.32-5-686, i686
• Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.2 (squeeze)
• Have admin access

Remote server:

• Linux 2.6.32-bpo.5-amd64, x86_64
• Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.8 (lenny)
• Don't have admin access, nor physical

I've probably missed some other vital statistic or bit of information, in which case I apologize. I'm fairly new to the whole non-Windows side of computing, so I barely know what I'm doing here.

Answer 1

Your locale information isn't set up correctly on the server machine. Specifically, the LC_CTYPE variable, which indicates the encoding of characters on the terminal, isn't set correctly (or, I suspect, at all).

In your local terminal, run locale to see your locale settings. You'll probably see (amongst other lines) something like LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8; what matters here is the .UTF-8 part, indicating the UTF-8 encoding. This is the de facto standard encoding for multilingual text in the unix world (and beyond).

You need to pass this information to the server. The best way, if it works, is to send locale information through the ssh connection. For this, add the following lines at the end of ~/.ssh/config:

Host *
SendEnv LC_*

This requires that a suitable AcceptEnv directive be present in the server configuration (/etc/ssh/sshd_config) (it is by default on Debian).

If that doesn't work, and you always log in to the server from a UTF-8 terminal, add the line export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 to your ~/.bashrc on the server (or ~/.zshrc or whatever file your shell uses). The locale name (e.g. en_US.UTF-8) must be one of those offered by locale -a, and must have .UTF-8 (or .utf8 or some trivial variation).