nix installer produces broken output on Darwin

[ChrisJefferson]

When running curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh, I get the following output:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  1408  100  1408    0     0   3211      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  3214
unpacking Nix binary tarball for x86_64-darwin from `https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.11.2/nix-1.11.2-x86_64-darwin.tar.bz2'...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 29.8M  100 29.8M    0     0  1395k      0  0:00:21  0:00:21 --:--:-- 2040k
performing a single-user installation of Nix...
directory /nix does not exist; creating it by running ‘�� using sudo
Password:

My particular issues if the second-to-last line, by running ?? using sudo (where the ? are unicode 'missing character' symbols, just in case github eats them).

[matthewbauer]

Are you using Terminal.app or something else? I think it might just be an issue with the ‘ and ’ chars.

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/scripts/install-nix-from-closure.sh#L28

[ChrisJefferson]

Thanks for the pointer to the script.

Short answer:Turn $cmd into ${cmd} on lines 28 and 30, and $dest into ${dest} on line 36.

I problems in both Terminal.app and iTerm2 (my usual terminal). On terminal the input turns into ascii ?, on iTerm2 I get the weird boxes.

The shell seem to be mis-interpreting $cmd’ . For the sake of interest / completeness, here are some commands on my machine, and what they output (both terminals)

    echo "‘’"  >&2
    echo "‘$cmd’ " >&2
    echo "‘${cmd}’ " >&2
    echo "directory $dest does not exist; creating it by running ‘${cmd}’ using sudo" >&2

‘’
‘��
‘mkdir -m 0755 /nix && chown caj /nix’
directory /nix does not exist; creating it by running ‘mkdir -m 0755 /nix && chown caj /nix’ using sudo

[domenkozar]

Fixed in #910