In my attempts to make short work of a program I decided to configure a couple of the function keys to enter commands for me. I go to settings->edit profile->keyboard->edit and a nice screen comes up to edit keyboard things. I scroll down to the function key, and enter a command in the output side of the window. This all works fine UNTIL I put a '*' in the output section. For some (good, I assume) reason this '*' character gets translated to a number that relates to the modifier (shift, control, alt, ...) that I have pressed. I assume that this is necessary, but I WANT A '*' to be emitted. Is there some escape (I've tried many) that will allow me to emit a '*' character. I tried \x2a, nope. \*, nope.

If people are interested, the modfiiers produce:
Window - 1
Shift - 2
Alt - 3
Shift, Alt - 4
Control - 5
Shift, Control - 6

I thought this was going to be simple!

I read this as meaning that the * does have special meaning in the kdm config, but you can get around it by using double backslash \\* to prevent the shell from interpreting * as a wildcard.

Source document

Further experiments using Konsole yield that \\* just emits \\1 (assuming you haven't pressed a modifier key). This can easily be tested by using the 'test area' when you are editing the "key bindings".

A simple experiment is to try using the '*' character and make it emit a '*' character. I haven't had any luck yet.

I have looked at the file:
~/.kde/share/apps/konsole/default.keytab
It has lots of '*' characters. Unfortunately NONE of them emit '*' characters, even when prefixed by normal escape characters (usually \, but I tried \\ as well). The strings are all contained in nice double quite marks ("). Try as I might, I can't get the konsole program to emit a '*' in a custom key setup.