use isatty() before formatting -h text

[amckinlay]

Subject of the issue

step -h outputs terminal escape sequences even when standard output is not a TTY device. Programs like vi and less will visually display the formatting characters instead of formatting the text. Terminal escape sequences should be disabled if not outputting to a terminal. step should check isatty() before formatting output text.

Your environment

• OS - darwin/amd64
• Version - 0.15.3

Steps to reproduce

step -h | less

Expected behaviour

`step -h | less' does not display formatting characters.

Actual behaviour

step -h | less shows terminal escape sequence characters interleaved with help text.

Additional context

Why is the output of step certificate create -h 331 lines in length? Could help be cut down into a separate -h and --help?

[maraino]

With less, you can use step -h | less -R and it will be properly displayed, in fact some version of less do this automatically. Some other tools won't have this option.

[amckinlay]

Thanks!

…

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 3:13 PM Mariano Cano ***@***.***> wrote: With less, you can use step -h | less -R and it will be properly displayed, in fact some version of less do this automatically. Some other tools won't have this option. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#408 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKJ2W4ZDIPDY6QGE5XX25TS3IBCJANCNFSM4WH6C56Q> .

[maraino]

@amckinlay I've modified a script I found in Stack Overflow to do this:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import re
import sys

ansi_escape = re.compile(r'\x1B(?:[@-Z\\-_]|\[[0-?]*[ -/]*[@-~])')
sys.stdout.write(ansi_escape.sub(b'', sys.stdin.read()))

$ step -h | ansi-escape
NAME
      step -- plumbing for distributed systems

USAGE
      step command [arguments]

OPTIONS
      --help, -h
          show help

      --config=value
          path to the config file to use for CLI flags

      --version, -v
          print the version

COMMANDS
      help, h      display help for the specified command or command group
      version      display the current version of the cli
      base64       encodes and decodes using base64 representation
      ca           initialize and manage a certificate authority
      certificate  create, revoke, validate, bundle, and otherwise manage certificates
      crypto       useful cryptographic plumbing
      oauth        authorization and single sign-on using OAuth & OIDC
      path         print the configured step path and exit
      ssh          create and manage ssh certificates

ONLINE
      This documentation is available online at https://smallstep.com/docs/cli

VERSION
      Smallstep CLI/0.15.3 (darwin/amd64)

COPYRIGHT
      (c) 2018-2020 Smallstep Labs, Inc.

FEEDBACK 😍 🍻
      The step utility is not instrumented for usage statistics. It does not
      phone home. But your feedback is extremely valuable. Any information you
      can provide regarding how you’re using step helps. Please send us a
      sentence or two, good or bad: feedback@smallstep.com or ask in GitHub
      Discussions.

[ftoppi]

Hello,
I hit the same issue with Windows Server 2012 R2 cmd prompt and powershell terminal. It makes it difficult to impossible to generate certificates using any authentiction method.
In addition, step-cli makes cmd/powershell terminal crash often).

It does not happen in cmd prompt from Windows 10 build 1909.

[maraino]

@ftoppi On windows we try to enable ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_INPUTand ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING according to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/console/setconsolemode. If the commands fail we print something like Failed to set console mode: ..., can you see an error like that?

Can you try a couple of things for me:

• Does it happen if you change the character encoding to UTF-8 in your terminal?
• Does it happens with the new Windows Terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

I want to change the input and markdown processors packages to something more portable, but I cannot tell you when this will happen.

[ftoppi]

@maraino in Windows 2012 R2, neither the flags nor changing encoding to UTF-8 (chcp 65001). I just reported it for awareness, the OS is "soon" out of extended support, I am not sure it's worth spending time on it.

Regarding Windows Terminal, it is not supported on Windows 2012 R2, so this settles that :-)

On Windows 10, cmd.exe is a bit funky but step cli works perfectly. Windows Terminal is completely fine as well.