I am quite often using Putty to connect to my server systems. I just recently recognized, while using „tree“, that the character encoding was wrong while connecting to one of the machines.

For instance, when I run „tree“ on the command line, it will look like the following:

You can get the current encoding by calling:

The solution is very simple. When taking a look to the Putty settings, those were set to „ISO-8859-1 : 1998“, which is in fact Latin-1, West Europe.

To get it right, simple choose another character translation.

Character Encoding in Putty

 

After re-connecting to your server, it will look like this:

seiler@docker:~$ tree . └── dockerfiles ├── datacontainer ├── mysql ├── nginx │   ├── Dockerfile │   ├── index.php │   ├── nginx.conf │   └── start.sh ├── postgresql └── tomcat

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

seiler@docker:~$ tree . └── dockerfiles     ├── datacontainer     ├── mysql     ├── nginx     │   ├── Dockerfile     │   ├── index.php     │   ├── nginx.conf     │   └── start.sh     ├── postgresql     └── tomcat

Sometimes there is a really easy solution for problems.