Piping Text To An External Program Appends A Trailing Newline

Question

I have been comparing hash values between multiple systems and was surprised to find that PowerShells hash values are different than that of other terminals.

Linux t

Answer 1

Linux terminals and PowerShell use different encodings. So real bytes produced by echo -n "string" are different. I tried it on my Linux Mint terminal and Windows 10 PowerShell. Here what I got:

Linux Mint:

73 74 72 69 6E 67

Windows 10:

FF FE 73 00 74 00 72 00 69 00 6E 00 67 00 0D 00 0A 00

It seems that Linux terminals use UTF-8 and Windows PowerShell uses UTF-16 with a BOM. Also in PowerShell you cannot use '-n' parameter for echo. So echo places newline characters \r\n (0D 00 0A 00) at the end of the "string".

Edit: As mklement0 said below, Windows PowerShell uses ASCII by default when piping.