non-ascii chars in octal in sub-shell windows

[Joseph Brenner]

When running a program that outputs utf-8 characters such as u-umlaut,
in a terminal window I'll see the actual character, but in an emacs
sub-shell I'm seeing the octal form (which looks like: \374).

Currently, in my emacs init files, I have these two lines:

  (set-language-environment 'utf-8)
  (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

What else might I need to get characters in a *shell* buffer to display
correctly?

I've tried a few other things, like set-terminal-coding-system,
and set-locale-environment to no avail.



The system LANG envar is set to: "en_US.UTF-8".

describe-coding-system reports:

Coding system for saving this buffer:
  Not set locally, use the default.
Default coding system (for new files):
  U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)

Coding system for keyboard input:
  U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)

Coding system for terminal output:
  U -- utf-8 (alias: mule-utf-8)

Coding system for inter-client cut and paste:
  nil
Coding systems for process I/O:
  encoding input to the process: U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)

  decoding output from the process: U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)

Defaults for subprocess I/O:
  decoding: U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)

  encoding: U -- utf-8-unix (alias: mule-utf-8-unix)


Priority order for recognizing coding systems when reading files:
  1. utf-8 (alias: mule-utf-8)
  2. iso-2022-7bit
  3. iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)
  4. iso-2022-7bit-lock (alias: iso-2022-int-1)
  5. iso-2022-8bit-ss2
  6. emacs-mule
  7. raw-text
  8. iso-2022-jp (alias: junet)
  9. in-is13194-devanagari (alias: devanagari)
  10. chinese-iso-8bit (alias: cn-gb-2312 euc-china euc-cn cn-gb gb2312)
  11. utf-8-auto
  12. utf-8-with-signature
  13. utf-16
  14. utf-16be-with-signature (alias: utf-16-be)
  15. utf-16le-with-signature (alias: utf-16-le)
  16. utf-16be
  17. utf-16le
  18. japanese-shift-jis (alias: shift_jis sjis)
  19. chinese-big5 (alias: big5 cn-big5 cp950)
  20. undecided

  Other coding systems cannot be distinguished automatically
  from these, and therefore cannot be recognized automatically
  with the present coding system priorities.

Particular coding systems specified for certain file names:

  OPERATION     TARGET PATTERN          CODING SYSTEM(s)
  ---------     --------------          ----------------
  File I/O      "\\.dz\\'"              (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.xz\\(~\\|\\.~[0-9]+~\\)?\\'"
                                        (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.g?z\\(~\\|\\.~[0-9]+~\\)?\\'"
                                        (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.\\(?:tgz\\|svgz\\|sifz\\)\\(~\\|\\.~[0-9]+~\\)?\\'"
                                        (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.tbz2?\\'"           (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.bz2\\(~\\|\\.~[0-9]+~\\)?\\'"
                                        (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.Z\\(~\\|\\.~[0-9]+~\\)?\\'"
                                        (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.elc\\'"             utf-8-emacs
                "\\.utf\\(-8\\)?\\'"    utf-8
                "\\.xml\\'"             xml-find-file-coding-system
                "\\(\\`\\|/\\)loaddefs.el\\'"
                                        (raw-text . raw-text-unix)
                "\\.tar\\'"             (no-conversion . no-conversion)
                "\\.po[tx]?\\'\\|\\.po\\."
                                        po-find-file-coding-system
                "\\.\\(tex\\|ltx\\|dtx\\|drv\\)\\'"
                                        latexenc-find-file-coding-system
                ""                      (undecided)
  Process I/O   nothing specified
  Network I/O   nothing specified

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