sftp: cannot enter umlauts like ä, ö, ü

[Roland Hieber]

When I am on the sftp prompt, I cannot enter something like ä, ö or ü. It just does nothing if I press the keys, so I can't transfer files including these characters. On the other hand, ls works fine with such files.

This is my curent locale:

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8

[Andi Hechtbauer (anti-dotu)]

strace output of sftp session, pressing "ä" at the "sftp> " prompt:

[...]
write(1, "sftp> "..., 6sftp> ) = 6
read(0, "\303"..., 1) = 1
read(0, "\244"..., 1) = 1
write(1, "\7"..., 1) = 1
read(0,

[Roland Hieber (rohieb)]

This seems to be fixed in upstream 5.3p1 (at least when I tried it 5 minutes ago :-)). Any chances to see a new release in lucid?

[Michael Bienia (geser)]

I can still reproduce this with openssh-client 1:5.3p1-3ubuntu4 from lucid-updates and even 1:5.5p1-3ubuntu1~ppa1 from Colin Watson's Openssh PPA on lucid.

[Will Bond (wbond)]

I can reproduce this with openssh-client 1:5.8p1-7ubuntu1.

I downloaded and compiled OpenSSH_5.9p1 and that version does not have the bug.

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

Version: 1:5.9p1-5ubuntu1.1

Still present.

Still cannot enter characters but using tab to auto-complete will work so long as the file does not begin with a "foreign" character:

sftp> get caf\303\251
Fetching /tmp/café to café
sftp> get na\303\257ve
Fetching /tmp/naïve to naïve
sftp> get anasth\303\246sia
Fetching /tmp/anasthæsia to anasthæsia

Sadly entering the "\303\246ether" for "æther" doesn't work.

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

With 1:6.6p1-2ubuntu2.3 (Trusty) the alt-tab completion works, but the character isn't echoed back.

sftp> get nave
Fetching /tmp/naïve to naïve

Attempts to enter a character (AltGr+a for æ or AltGr+[+i for ï, for example) simply results in an error beep, which is new but thoroughly useless and a step backwards.

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

Still broken in Trusty, but fixed in Xenial.

Trusty:
Version: 1:6.6p1-2ubuntu2.8

Xenial:
Version: 1:7.2p2-4ubuntu2.1

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Possibly 0e059cdf5fd86297546c63fa8607c24059118832. Bear in mind that you might need later commits to avoid regressions, though, such as dda78a03af32e7994f132d923c2046e98b7c56c8.

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

As noted earlier this is fixed in Xenial and newer, however still seen on Trusty.

Thanks to cjwatson for pointing out the merge that has the fix for this as well as noting other commits to avoid regressions. After looking at the fixes, I believe this would be a fairly invasive and involved SRU to get these pushed back to the version found on Trusty. Because of this I am marking the Trusty task as 'wontfix'.