Robocopy unilog output is gibberish

I tried to get robocopy in Windows 7 to generate a Unicode log, since I have files with Unicode characters. The command I used:

robocopy C:\mysource D:\mydest /mir /unilog:backup.log /tee

File the copy works and the onscreen output is correct, the log file itself just contains gibberish. This is regardless of whether I use the Command Prompt or the Powershell.

What gives? Am I doing something wrong?

Bug in XP27. Try downgrade to XP26.

It appears to be a bug in the XP27 version of RoboCopy (which comes with Windows 7).

In version XP26 (which comes with Windows Vista) /UNILOG produces a perfectly readable Unicode log file for me.

If you don't have a copy of Vista laying around EasyRoboCopy also comes with the XP26 version. (I haven't actually tried EasyRoboCopy itself, just extracted robocopy.exe out of its setup file using WinRAR.)

At a glance, I'd say the file written by Robocopy while using the /UNILOG and /TEE switches contains a UTF-16 little-endian byte order mark followed by an ISO-8859-1 terminal typescript.

To make it readable, I did the following in Ubuntu:

dd if=robocopy.log ibs=1 skip=2 obs=512        | # Strip the byte order mark
  iconv --from-code ISO-8859-1 --to-code UTF-8 | # Convert to UTF-8
  col -b > robocopy_utf-8.log                    # Interpret control characters

The resulting file matches what I saw in the Windows command prompt.

Further reading: man dd, man iconv, man col

Looking at the (binary) file output on Win7, the /UNILOG option is useless. It writes the standard UNICODE BOM (FFFE), but then proceeds to write all narrow characters EXCEPT for the options line (e.g., /BYTES /S /COPY:DATS ...), which is actual unicode. After that, it reverts back to ANSI chars, and it is not UTF-8, either; i.e., if you have a filename with a wide character in the path, it is converted to a narrow '?' character.

Apparently no interest in fixing it from MSFT, since it's been this way for some time, and I have all updates.

I fixed my unreadable, Unicode-format Robocopy log files in Windows (which were accidentally created by appending normal Robocopy output to Unicode output from Out-File in PowerShell), as follows:

In PowerShell:

$bytes = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes('C:\Temp\RoboCopyLog.txt')
$len = $bytes.Length
#Remove the Unicode BOM, and convert to ASCII
$text = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($bytes,2,$len -2)
$text

The above code may not work for all file sizes!

(Credit for code: I adapted code from this post by Ferdinand Prantl: Stackoverflow - Read/Parse Binary files with PowerShell

Use UTF-8 code page, then run winword converter

If your file or directory names contain Unicode characters then before issuing the Robocopy command with the /unilog parameter use the chcp 65001 command. (Code page 65001 is UTF-8.)

Once you have the mangled Unicode log, just open it up in MS Word as Unicode (UTF-8) and save it: