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It looks like at random times my keyboard inserts a character that is displayed as a space character but isn't one, preventing the shell from interpreting it correctly. For example before "sort" below :

yannick@yannick-ubuntu:~/Pictures/Photos$ ls | grep "2015" | sort
No command ' sort' found, did you mean:
 Command 'psort' from package 'radiance' (universe)
 Command 'sort' from package 'coreutils' (main)
 Command 'tsort' from package 'coreutils' (main)
 Command 'msort' from package 'msort' (universe)
 sort: command not found

If I go back in history, delete the "bad" space and write another one, then the command works fine :

yannick@yannick-ubuntu:~/Pictures/Photos$ ls | grep "2015" | sort
20150101
20150103
20150107
20150109
20150111
20150115

Any ideas what happens ?

I enter all my commands using keyboard (no copy / paste), I am using gnome terminal on ubuntu 14.04, and I have a french (azerty) keyboard.

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  • Are you using the AltGr key to enter the pipe? I think you might have to press space twice. Once to end the symbol input and then once for the regular space.
    – chaskes
    May 14, 2015 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

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6

Actually I figured it out ! When I press AltGr + Space, a non-breaking space is inserted, which looks exactly like a space... but isn't one.

On a french keyboard, the pipe character is inserted using AltGr + 6. What happens is sometimes the AltGr is still down when I press the Space, which is why this "bad" space character is inserted.

This problem has a bug report on launchpad. The suggested solution is to use the following command so that no non-breaking spaces are inserted :

setxkbmap -option "nbsp:none"

To do it permanently, I added the line in .bashrc and it works fine ! Note that doing it in .profile doesn't work (I guess if it's not in .bashrc the shell overrides it at startup)

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