Robocopy unilog output is gibberish

Question

I tried to get robocopy in Windows 7 to generate a Unicode log, since I have files with Unicode characters. The command I used:

robocopy C:\mysource D:\mydest /mir /unilog:backup.log /tee

File the copy works and the onscreen output is correct, the log file itself just contains gibberish. This is regardless of whether I use the Command Prompt or the Powershell.

What gives? Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

It appears to be a bug in the XP27 version of RoboCopy (which comes with Windows 7). In version XP26 (which comes with Windows Vista) /UNILOG produces a perfectly readable Unicode log file for me. If you don't have a copy of Vista laying around EasyRoboCopy also comes with the XP26 version. (I haven't actually tried EasyRoboCopy itself, just extracted robocopy.exe out of its setup file using WinRAR.)

Answer 2

In your case, the command in Powershell goes something like this:

robocopy C:\mysource D:\mydest /mir | Out-File backup.log

The workaround is that you use Out-File instead of built-in /unilog parameter. You will get exactly the same log file, but now it will be properly written in unicode.

Answer 3

I'm not very familiar with Windows, but, at a glance, I'd say the file written by Robocopy while using the /UNILOG and /TEE switches contains a UTF-16 little-endian byte order mark followed by an ISO-8859-1 terminal typescript.

To make it readable, I did the following:

1. Strip the byte order mark.
2. Convert to UTF-8.
3. Interpret and then filter out terminal control characters.

by running this command in Ubuntu:

dd if=robocopy.log ibs=1 skip=2 obs=512 \
  | iconv --from-code ISO-8859-1 --to-code UTF-8 \
  | col -b \
  > robocopy_utf-8.log

The resulting file matches what I saw in the Windows command prompt.