Annoying non-breakable spaces in Bash/Zsh
This is an annoyance I found got around to solve. In Konsole, with a basic X configuration, when you type AltGr Space, you get a non-breakable space. It might happen in other things X terminal/shell combo, or the both of them might not matter at all.
If you are an heavy shell user, you might hit the AltGr Space combo by accident. This wouldn’t be bad if the shell made it somehow obvious that what you entered in a non-breakable space. The fact is that it doesn’t and it’s then totally impossible to distinguish a regular space with a non-breakable space after it was typed in the shell.
cd $HOME zsh: no such file or directory: cd /home/fdgonthier
After typing such a command quickly, I was often left wondering what the hell was wrong with my command, since, as far as I could see, it was syntaxically correct.
The problem is that since there is a non-breakable space between cd and $HOME, Zsh wants to execute the whole command as a single command. Since I didn’t know I could even type non-breakable space in X, I checked what the hell the shell was doing by using strace. strace is my favorite diagnosis tool for any kind of problems in Linux. Programs don’t lie when they are spied with strace. The problem is obvious:
execve("cd\302\240/home/fdgonthier", ["cd\302\240/home/fdgonthier"], [/* 30 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
It took me a while but I’ve found that \302\240 is the Unicode sequence for non-breakable space. Once I have found that, I Google search lead me to Launchpad bug 218637.
On this page, you see that you can disable non-breakable space using a xkb option in xorg.conf. Simply add the following in the InputDevice section related to your keyboard.
... Option "XkbOptions" "nbsp:none" ...
or use
setxkbmap -option "nbsp:none"
in a console, your favorite initialization file, or elsewhere.
Non-breakable spaces created by AltGr+Space are only created when you use a terminal locale that uses the right alt/option key as AltGr, such as Canada (ca_enhanced) or something similar. Personnally, I use the US keyboard in shells (and Canada/ca_enhanced in other applications surch as mail, IM, etc.).
I wonder if there’s a way of configuring the shell (or the terminal) to display an alternate character for the non-breakable space, something like
Steven Pigeon
October 30, 2008 at 4:04 pm
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Natisha
May 19, 2013 at 8:51 am