Robert,
i wonder if this SO exchange might be familiar:
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https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/368803/bash-seems-to-be-in-special-mode
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i just ran into something similar, where typing into the shell gave odd
characters (or, the "(arg: 1)" prompt). in this case, for *me*, (*)
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bash apollo2 (master): {35664} bind -v | grep convert-meta
set convert-meta on
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was an indicator of what was wrong. in my ~/.inputrc i had
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set convert-meta on
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(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
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export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
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changing that to
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export XMODIFIERS=@im=none
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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.