Cron sends mails with ASCII charset while running tasks in UTF-8

[Walter]

Seeing that #140896 is closed and fixed, I'm rereporting this bug here for Trusty (and earlier).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cron/+bug/140896

This issue is that:

(A) The cron daemon starts with no LANG (LANG=C)
(B) The processes start with the lang environment from /etc/default/locale (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)

Now the processes will print stuff like:

    rm: cannot remove ‘abc’ <-- note the non-ascii characters, because it has LANG=...UTF-8

But the cron mail with that error, will use:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968

instead of:

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

That causes mail clients to get UTF-8 while it is told that it gets ASCII, resulting in a crappy reading experience.

A working fix for me is to add the LANG variable to /etc/init/cron.conf so the cron process gets

    # echo 'env LANG=en_US.UTF-8' > /etc/init/cron.override
    # stop cron; start cron

(Or alternately, the CONTENT_TYPE= setting in crontab as suggested in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410057 )

I believe this bug got introduced by using upstart instead of the init script:
- the processes get the environment from /etc/pam.d/cron (LANG=en_US.UTF-8)
- cron gets the environment from /etc/default/locale BUT ONLY if it was started from /etc/init.d/cron. the upstart script does not load /etc/environment nor /etc/default/locale.

.. so .. that should probably mean that this is a ubuntu/cron bug, not an ubuntu/+source/cron bug.

And it first starts showing in Trusty because the tools use fancier tokens when unicode is available:

    ubuntu precise:
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove `/tmp/abc': No such file or directory

    ubuntu trusty
    # locale | grep ^LANG=; rm /tmp/abc
    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    rm: cannot remove ‘/tmp/abc’: No such file or directory <-- see the fancy quotes here

Cheers,
Walter Doekes
OSSO B.V.

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty
# dpkg -l cron | grep ^ii
ii cron 3.0pl1-124ubuntu2

[Walter (wdoekes)]

The attached patch lp1321227-cron_does_not_read_default_locale.patch is a workaround that loads /etc/default/locale like it should.

With upstart, this was the best I could do. And it's not great.

- expect doesn't take more than 2 forks
- there is no way to load /etc/default/locale without hardcoding its values or using a script

(While working on this I had the joys of kernel panics with upstart, but that's a different matter.)

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "lp1321227-cron_does_not_read_default_locale.patch" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issues please contact him.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.