[dimes]

I have a similar, Unicode-related “favorite bug”.

We were expanding our product to a new language that used non-ASCII code points. Part of the system involved invoking binaries using text as input.

Locally, everything worked great. Once deployed, we got corrupted text output. As soon as we SSH’d on to the server to inspect, everything started working again.

It turns out that SSH servers can modify the LANG environment variable. The default value on our servers didn’t support Unicode, but LANG was updated as soon as we connected via ssh. It was a head scratcher for sure.