Robert, i wonder if this SO exchange might be familiar: ---- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/368803/bash-seems-to-be-in-special-mode ----
i just ran into something similar, where typing into the shell gave odd characters (or, the "(arg: 1)" prompt). in this case, for *me*, (*) ---- bash apollo2 (master): {35664} bind -v | grep convert-meta set convert-meta on ---- was an indicator of what was wrong. in my ~/.inputrc i had ---- set convert-meta on ---- (for some reason lost in history.) taking this line out fixed *my* problem with (newly invoked) shells. for completeness, i *also* had a problem with emacs, which seems to be because in my .bashrc, i had ---- export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus ---- changing that to ---- export XMODIFIERS=@im=none ---- made emacs happy. cheers, Greg (*) causing X11's "compose feature" (which, through keyd(8), is how i'm generating these non-ASCII characters) to send characters like ó to, e.g., cat(1), worked. my problems seemed to be just with the shell and emacs.