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 [email protected] 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.

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[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 😍 🍻
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      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.