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I set up an Ubuntu VPS from Digital Ocean recently.

When I log in as root, I'm able to navigate around the terminal properly

When I sudo as any other user, I get some extremely strange terminal behavior

  • I can't move my cursor left. It overrwites it with strange control characters, eg. rvm ^[[D
  • I can't use the up arrow to navigate previous commands. I get something similar - $ ^[[A^[[A^[[A
  • Vim is absolutely un-usable. Moving in any direction causes a strange combination of inserting the above control characters or "overwriting" existing characters. I can't delete either.
  • Tab completion doesn't exist at all. Same output as above.

Since this all works when logged in as root, I suspect it's something software related which makes me hopeful it can be fixed.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

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  • Hate when this happens... I have no solution tho :(
    – Tim
    Jun 10, 2015 at 20:24
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    Check what shell the user is using echo $SHELL. Certain shells work differently. BASH shell, or /bin/bash allows the arrow keys for movement. To switch to bash, just type in bash at the command prompt.
    – Terrance
    Jun 10, 2015 at 20:26
  • Wow, that worked perfectly! You were right, it was using /bin/sh. The followup question would be - how do I get it to always use bash as its shell? Should I put export SHELL=/bin/bash in the ~/.profile file ? It seems strange that root defaults to using bash but the created users dont
    – user2490003
    Jun 10, 2015 at 20:32
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    The command sudo usermod -s /bin/bash <username> should do it.
    – Terrance
    Jun 10, 2015 at 20:34
  • I am going to put that as an answer.
    – Terrance
    Jun 10, 2015 at 20:34

2 Answers 2

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bash should be set for the shell for the user for the arrow keys to work. To find out what shell they are using, type in the following from a terminal window while logged in as the user:

echo $SHELL

if it is not bash, the following will add the shell variable to the user:

sudo usermod -s /bin/bash <username>

Hope that helps.

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    Perfect answer. Also my original mistake for anyone stumbling across this was not creating the user with the proper shell in the first place. useradd defaults to /bin/sh so I deleted the user and readded it with useradd -m <user> --shell $SHELL, although the usermod would've been more proper :)
    – user2490003
    Jun 10, 2015 at 21:18
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Note that if you want to change the default shell, you should edit the value of the SHELL variable in /etc/default/useradd to be "/bin/bash". That way, new users should automatically get /bin/bash as their shell (unless overridden on the command line).

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