Re: initdb.exe Fails on Windows When Password File Path Contains Non-ASCII Characters

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 5:12 PM Manika Singhal <
manika(dot)singhal(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The postgresql windows installer packaged by EDB, creates the postgresql
> instance on the fly.
> It creates a temporary file to store the password and then deletes it once
> the initdb is run successfully.
> But a user reported the initdb fails. On debugging it was found that, it
> occurs because the username in the
> %TEMP% contains the non-ascii characters as shown in the example below
>

> initdb.exe --pgdata="C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\17\data"
> --username=postgres --encoding=UTF8
> --pwfile="C:\Users\玛妮卡\AppData\Local\Temp\passwdXXX" --auth=scram-sha-256
>

> initdb: error: could not open file
> "C:\Users\???\AppData\Local\Temp\psswrdXXXX" for reading: No such file or
> directory
>

> It seems that initdb.exe does not correctly handle paths containing
> Unicode characters, replacing them with ???
> in the error message. I want to ask if this is the expected behaviour of
> initdb.exe?
>

> When the user temp location is replaced with system temp (c:\windows\temp)
> the error goes away.
> Any suggestions if the installer should use this path to create the
> password file?
>
>
>
sending again with corrected spacing. Sorry for the inconvenience!

-----------------------------
> Thanks & Regards
> Manika Singhal
> EDB India
>