I just came here to report this issue and found that I had already reported it.

rethinkdb admin also prints out bolding and unbolding escapes that don't work so nicely when paging it through cat or less. None of the other commands see fit to do this.

I thought @Tryneus fixed this just recently(ish)?

I removed the help pager entirely, so that really shouldn't be a problem anymore. However, the control characters are certainly still there, I did nothing to change that. As far as I remember, control characters for bold and underline are used, but only on help commands. I don't know if there's an easy way to detect the terminal capabilities to filter those out, or we could just remove them entirely (though I think that would hurt the general use case).

We almost certainly shouldn't be sending control characters to things that we don't know can use them. We should detect whether we're talking to a tty, and if we are, we should use getenv or the like to make sure we aren't talking to a dumb terminal. (I'm not sure this is worth doing immediately.)

Ok, I implemented a fix for the terminal command codes in review 950.

This has been approved and merged into next in commit cf9d300. Will be in release 1.10.