4 ms·

You can still end up in such situations today without the absurdity of using word, if you're using Windows. I've wasted an hour or so this year trying to figur

You can still end up in such situations today without the absurdity of using word, if you're using Windows. I've wasted an hour or so this year trying to figure out why an instance of Microsoft's sshd port of OpenSSH didn't behave as configured. It took a while for me to realize that if you create/change the config files with Windows tooling, they will likely end up being encoded in UTF-16, which means that every second byte is a NUL character. If you have a C codebase expecting UTF-8 (like most UNIX-ish tools), that can lead to the config files just being ignored (as the tool likely hits a NUL before the first real character). In the case of sshd, you won't get any warnings or errors, either.

fomine3 6y ago
PowerShell (before Core version) uses UTF-16 for default encoding, I wonder who is happy by this default encoding.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  You need to know your history in order to understand this. Very briefly: Development on Windows NT began in 1989, three years before UTF-8 was even invented; and there was a difference of opinion between the ISO people and the Unicode Consortium over Unicode being 16-bit or 32-bit, with Joseph D. Becker famously publishing a paper in 1988 declaring that 16 bits were sufficient for Unicode ("with a safety factor of about four").