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

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?

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Thanks & Regards

Manika Singhal

EDB India