How to Fix Garbled Characters When Using AWS Session Manager with Git Bash

Which OS do you typically use for work?
Personally, I use a Mac, but at work I use Windows.

In a Windows environment, I use Git Bash, which is lightweight, easy to use, and allows POSIX-like operations.
Since it can also be used from Windows Terminal, you can continue using familiar commands as-is, and it works well with the AWS CLI.

For these reasons, I also used Git Bash when connecting to EC2 via AWS Systems Manager Session Manager (hereinafter, SSM).
However, on Windows Git Bash, some box-drawing characters and symbols included in commands like lsblk or systemctl status sometimes became garbled.

In this article, I will introduce how to reproduce this issue, its cause, and how to work around it.

In conclusion, the first choice is to update the session-manager-plugin to the latest version.
If updating is difficult, changing the code page to UTF-8 with chcp.com 65001 was effective.

Note that this issue did not occur when connecting from a Mac.

The following environment was used for testing:

• OS: Windows 11 (Pro)
• Terminal: Git Bash
• AWS CLI: aws-cli/2.32.16 Python/3.13.11 Windows/11 exe/AMD64
• session-manager-plugin: 1.2.707.0 (at the start of testing) → 1.2.792.0 (resolved)

This article is intended for those who:

• Connect to EC2 using AWS CLI/SSM on Windows + Git Bash
• Experience garbled box-drawing characters or symbols in lsblk or systemctl status

The mitigation methods are as follows:

During testing, I confirmed that updating to the latest session-manager-plugin resolves the issue.

Note: This version was released three days before writing and testing this article.

At the time of writing, updating the plugin to 1.2.792.0 eliminated the garbling.

For installation instructions, please refer to the following AWS official documentation:

Installing the Session Manager Plugin on Windows

The release notes for 1.2.792.0, the latest version at the time of writing, included fixes related to keyboard input and character processing in Windows environments.

• session-manager-plugin 1.2.792.0 Release Page

Looking at the following PR related to 1.2.792.0, you can see that an issue similar to the one described in this article was addressed:

• PR: Fix Chinese and Japanese character display issues on Windows platform

This PR explains that the Windows version of session-manager-plugin was using the windows.WriteFile API when outputting, and some UTF-8 characters for certain languages were not being processed correctly.

As a result, Chinese and Japanese input/output was partially garbled.

It is highly likely that the garbling observed in this article was also resolved by this fix included in 1.2.792.0.

The latter half of this article summarizes the reproduction steps and temporary workarounds when using an older version (1.2.707.0).

First, update the plugin to the latest version and verify whether the issue is resolved.

When using an older version of the plugin (e.g., 1.2.707.0), garbling occurred when running commands like the following:

This was tested on the official AMIs for Amazon Linux 2023 and Ubuntu 24.04, but the garbling appeared in the same places regardless of the AMI.

lsblk
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0          7:0    0 27.8M  1 loop /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/12322
loop1          7:1    0   74M  1 loop /snap/core22/2339
loop2          7:2    0 48.1M  1 loop /snap/snapd/25935
nvme0n1      259:0    0    8G  0 disk
笏懌楳nvme0n1p1  259:1    0    7G  0 part /
笏懌楳nvme0n1p14 259:2    0    4M  0 part
笏懌楳nvme0n1p15 259:3    0  106M  0 part /boot/efi
笏披楳nvme0n1p16 259:4    0  913M  0 part /boot

systemctl status sshd
笳・sshd.service - OpenSSH server daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/sshd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2026-03-20 14:18:54 UTC; 1min 12s ago
       Docs: man:sshd(8)
             man:sshd_config(5)
   Main PID: 1553 (sshd)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 1067)
     Memory: 2.3M
        CPU: 15ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/sshd.service
             笏披楳1553 "sshd: /usr/sbin/sshd -D [listener] 0 of 10-100 startups"

As you can see, the box-drawing characters and status icons are garbled.

When examining these characters, the result was as follows:

From the above, it can be concluded that the garbling occurred because the UTF-8 strings were mistakenly interpreted as CP932 (Shift_JIS family).

In other words, the character encoding settings of the console on the Git Bash side did not match the strings received via SSM, resulting in box-drawing characters and symbols not being displayed correctly.

In this environment, the result of running chcp.com was CP932.

If you want to check your current Git Bash settings, you can use the following command:

chcp.com
Active code page: 932

If you cannot download the latest version or have restrictions on installation, try the following command to change the current code page to UTF-8:

chcp.com 65001
Active code page: 65001

References

• How to Fix Garbled Japanese Text in Git Bash
• Qiita: How to Convert Character Encoding in Git Bash (Windows)
• Microsoft chcp
• Microsoft Code Page Identifiers

After changing the console code page to UTF-8 and checking again, I confirmed that the previously garbled sections were output correctly.

When using the latest session-manager-plugin, the output was correct without having to run chcp.com 65001.

lsblk
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0          7:0    0 27.8M  1 loop /snap/amazon-ssm-agent/12322
loop1          7:1    0   74M  1 loop /snap/core22/2339
loop2          7:2    0 48.1M  1 loop /snap/snapd/25935
nvme0n1      259:0    0    8G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1  259:1    0    7G  0 part /
├─nvme0n1p14 259:2    0    4M  0 part
├─nvme0n1p15 259:3    0  106M  0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p16 259:4    0  913M  0 part /boot

systemctl status sshd
● sshd.service - OpenSSH server daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/sshd.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sun 2026-03-20 15:22:04 UTC; 33s ago
       Docs: man:sshd(8)
             man:sshd_config(5)
   Main PID: 1549 (sshd)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 1067)
     Memory: 2.3M
        CPU: 15ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/sshd.service
             └─1549 "sshd: /usr/sbin/sshd -D [listener] 0 of 10-100 startups"

If changing the code page every time is troublesome, you can add the setting to .bashrc so that it automatically switches to UTF-8 when Git Bash starts:

echo 'chcp.com 65001 > /dev/null' >> ~/.bashrc

In this article, I introduced the cause and mitigation methods for garbled characters occurring when using SSM on Git Bash.

To summarize the key points:

• First, update the session-manager-plugin to the latest version
• If you’re using an older plugin, you may experience garbling due to the console code page on the Git Bash side
• In environments where you cannot update, switching to UTF-8 with chcp.com 65001 is effective
• For continued use, you can persist it by adding it to .bashrc

Until now, even when garbling occurred, I dealt with it by manually interpreting the distorted parts.
Recently, as EC2-related work has increased, the frequency of encountering garbling has also increased, so I researched mitigation methods in this article.
It took some time to arrive at the solution, so I hope the content of this article is helpful to you.

Thank you for reading until the end.