Bash dialog displays unknown text

Question

I am trying to use dialog on bash but I get some extra text on the screen.

this is the line for dialog:

dialog --title "Hello" --msgbox 'Hello world!' 6 20

and this is the output:

any idea why this is happening?

Answer 1

It looks like dialog is using box-drawing characters which your terminal emulator doesn't understand properly (among other issues).

For a quick work-around, you can tell dialog to use - and + to draw boxes, or to not try to draw them at all:

dialog --ascii-lines --title "Hello" --msgbox 'Hello world!' 6 20
dialog --no-lines    --title "Hello" --msgbox 'Hello world!' 6 20