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.singhal@enterprisedb.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!

-----------------------------