Why is there a \r (^M) in stdout and usage and xccdf output

[darrenmoffat]

I've noticed that the format strings for displaying the human readable progress output (when not passing --progress) have a \r in them that results in a ^M in the output.

This is a pattern also used in the usage output. For the usage it seems to result in missing output when using gnome-terminal (at least for me), but not for xterm.

eg:

$ oscap xccdf -h
oscap -> xccdf

eXtensible Configuration Checklist Description Format

Usage: oscap [options] xccdf command [command-specific-options]

Commands:
- Perform evaluation driven by XCCDF file and use OVAL as checking engine
- Resolve an XCCDF document
- Validate XCCDF XML content
- Validate XCCDF XML content
- Export XCCDF values as OVAL external-variables document(s)
- Convert XCCDF Benchmark to other formats
- Perform remediation driven by XCCDF TestResult file or ARF.

but it should look like this (but without the ^M), the output below was generated by piping to less.

oscap -> xccdf

eXtensible Configuration Checklist Description Format

Usage: oscap [options] xccdf command [command-specific-options]

Commands:
eval^M - Perform evaluation driven by XCCDF file and use OVAL as checking engine
resolve^M - Resolve an XCCDF document
validate^M - Validate XCCDF XML content
validate-xml^M - Validate XCCDF XML content
export-oval-variables^M - Export XCCDF values as OVAL external-variables document(s)
generate^M - Convert XCCDF Benchmark to other formats
remediate^M - Perform remediation driven by XCCDF TestRe

[jan-cerny]

Hi, for me it works in GNOME Terminal. I am using gnome-terminal-3.20.3-1.fc24.x86_64 and I don't notice anything missing.

I think that \r (carriage return) there is a hack to align all the options - to have all the bullets on the same collumn in order to look better.

However I agree that this looks ugly when you are not in terminal but you redirect the output afterwards. We also need to remove those \r characters in oscap-docker etc.

I think that something like aligning function like Python has would be benficial for handling this.

[mpreisler]

Fixed by @jan-cerny in 6c19c67