3

When I erroneously type 'ñ' (expecting to type any command) and then remove it and type the correct letter, the output returns the command with a special character attached �, obviously the shell don't recognize the command and I must re-type it being careful not to type again the 'ñ' character.

e.g.

Wrong typing       @tachomi:~$ ñs
Correct typing     @tachomi:~$ ls
Output             �ls: command not found
  • Why is this happening since I removed the wrong character?
  • How can I solve this?

What I think is that this kind of characters ñ , ' etc are not compatible with the shell being this the reason that the "memory" keeps something that it doesn't recognize, but I want to be sure why is this happening.

I'm using bash shell

Improve this question
8
  • When I type that in, bash tells me: bash: $'\303\261s': command not found, but ls continues to work normally. You might want to experiment with the builtin hash command: hash -l and hash -r Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:07
  • 2
    Does not happen here... probably depend some strange LANG settings. In UTF-8 ñ is a two-bytes char, so you must have the terminal ignoring it. Which terminal are you using? How is LANG set? Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:08
  • @Rmano I'm using bash shell, how can I know the configured LANG? Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:15
  • 6
    <guessing> ñ is two bytes character and your backspace character for some reason deletes only one of them </guessing> Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:17
  • 1
    Tried it here on xterm and gnome-terminal and it works as expected, ([BackSpace] wipes ñ) but my lang is en_GB.UTF-8, so if you can reproduce this, could you test this by pressing [BackSpace] twice? Once for the first byte of the unicode character and once for the second??? Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:54

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
7

You have a terminal (or terminal emulator) which understands multibyte encodings (probably UTF-8), but a shell which doesn't. Try setting the environment variable LANG to C.UTF-8. Or run locale -a to find another likely value to try.

Improve this answer
2

Due to all help, I could find out how to fix this.

The main issue is due to the UTF-8 encoding, the server didn't have it configured as said in comments.

Quoting comments:

[@Rmano]: In UTF-8, ñ is a two-bytes char

[@jimmij]: backspace character for some reason deletes only one of them

[@aecolley]: Try setting the environment variable LANG to C.UTF-8

This is fixed as follows:

Find your current LANG    $ locale -v | grep 'LANG='
Output                    LANG=en_US
Change                    $ sudo LANG=en_US.UTF-8
or
Change                    $ sudo vim /etc/default/locale
Edit                      ~LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

Restart your terminal session.

Improve this answer
0

You could run the following line of code:

if [[$(locale -v | grep 'LANG=') != *.UTF-8]]; then sudo $(locale -v | grep 'LANG=').UTF-8; fi

If the character code is not already UTF-8, it will set the character code to the UTF-8 version of the current character code. This way, the shell will understand UTF-8 characters, and will backspace them properly.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.