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Can someone let me know why sometimes Ubuntu Automatically refreshes browser and types some weird characters on shell prompt is opened.

Is it because of memory leak! Correct me if I'm wrong. Because of this multiple refresh www.askubuntu.com thrown this screen.

I was able to resolve this sort of behavior only if I close all the windows and currectly active/opened shell prompts or other applications.

uname -a

 Linux 2.6.38-11-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 29 19:05:14 UTC 2011 i686 i686 i386    GNU/Linux

Page Refreshes Multiple Times

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  • What weird characters? Can you copy them here?
    – arrange
    Aug 29, 2011 at 8:37
  • the last time I saw it was " ~~~~~~ " repeating multiple times without any event or action from the user. But these characters changes at different times.
    – user7044
    Aug 29, 2011 at 8:40

2 Answers 2

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It looks like your F5 key got stuck.

F5 makes your browser refresh the page and/or prints ~ into the prompt.

Try a different keyboard and see if it resolves the problem.

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There could be many reasons for such behavior:

  • Bad hardware (RAM) - do a memory test from the GRUB menu
  • Bad programs which modified your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc files
  • Someone else who installed remote controlling software (use the System monitor to check for weird processes, or use ps auxww)
  • Autotyper / cheating software which hit a key many times on a single keypress

To get more information, you can use ps auxww as described above, the memory test from GRUB and your logs at /var/log (in particular, /var/log/kern.log and /var/log/syslog)

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