etautil command fails to process local non-US characters

Products

• CA Identity Manager
• CA Identity Governance
• CA Identity Portal
• CA Identity Suite

Issue/Introduction

When executing etautil commands containing local non-US characters in a Windows command prompt, scripts fail because characters are misinterpreted. This occurs when the command shell environment character encoding does not align with the command input.

Environment

Identity Manager 14.5

Cause

The issue occurs because the default Windows command shell code page (e.g., 437 for US English) does not support characters outside the standard ASCII range (0-127). When etautil processes commands containing these characters, the input is misread. You can verify the active code page by running chcp in the command prompt.

Resolution

Use one of the following solutions to resolve the character encoding issue:

Solution 1: Update the Console Code Page Change the active console code page in your batch script to support your local character set.

1. Open your batch script.
2. Add the chcp command followed by your specific code page identifier (e.g., 1252 for Western European).
3. Execute the etautil command immediately following the code page change.

Example:

@ECHO offchcp 1252SET ETAHOME="C:\Program Files (x86)\CA\Identity Manager\Provisioning Server"%ETAHOME%\bin\etautil -u superadmin -p secret update 'eTGlobalUserContainerName=Global Users,eTNamespaceName=CommonObjects,dc=im' eTGlobalUser eTGlobalUserName=<user> eTTitle=<name>

Solution 2: Process via Input File Use the -f flag to process instructions from a text file. This prevents the command shell from translating characters before they reach the etautil tool.

1. Create an input text file (e.g., inputfile.txt) containing the full etautil update statement.
2. Modify your batch script to call etautil with the -f flag pointing to the input file.

Example:

@ECHO offSET ETAHOME="C:\Program Files (x86)\CA\Identity Manager\Provisioning Server"%ETAHOME%\bin\etautil -u superadmin -p secret -f inputfile.txt

Additional Information

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