# net-mgmt/iftop garbled characters



## dougs (Nov 4, 2021)

On all of my FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE servers, iftop displays garbled characters in place of horizontal lines like this:






I've reinstalled iftop and verified that ncurses is already installed. Still I am unable to display a clean iftop screen. Does anyone have suggestions or tips to share?

~Doug


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## Andriy (Nov 7, 2021)

Perhaps you use a non-unicode locale. Or something like that.


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## dougs (Nov 17, 2021)

How do I switch to a non-unicode locale? At least how do I verify this? Can you point me toward additional references?


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## dougs (Nov 17, 2021)

Never mind- I found the command to list locale.

`[root@squid 16.Nov 11:05pm /usr/ports/net-mgmt/iftop]# locale
LANG=C.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=`


Since this is for the root account, it appears to be good practice not to change the locale.

BTW, I do not run x11. This is on the console.

not sure what to do next. Any hints?


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## dougs (Nov 17, 2021)

I seem to recall a clean interface when I ran iftop on FreeBSD v12. I am running 13.0-RELEASE at the moment. Did anything change between these two releases that may have affected this?


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## grahamperrin@ (Nov 18, 2021)

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE Release Notes | The FreeBSD Project – nothing relevant, at a glance.

What terminal application do you use?



dougs said:


> Since this is for the root account, it appears to be good practice not to change the locale.



What's the locale of your non-root account?

Use of sudo(8) might help.


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## Andriy (Nov 22, 2021)

grahamperrin it seems you missed this:


> BTW, I do not run x11. This is on the console.


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## Andriy (Nov 22, 2021)

Perhaps the issue is with using sc versus vt terminal emulators.
Or their parameters (like hw.vga.textmode=1).
Or console fonts.


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## dougs (Dec 21, 2021)

It turned out it was my VT terminal emulator, SecureCRT. The character encoding was set to DEFAULT. Once I changed it to UTF-8, the horizontal lines were shown cleanly.

Sorry for the noise!

~Doug


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## Andriy (Dec 22, 2021)

Oh, so this was remote... Not a local console as I assumed...


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