First of all, I'm not a bash user so keep your comments at bay my friends.

My buddy is a bash user and has been experiencing an interesting problem lately: the lowercase 'b' does not show up in a terminal window! All other letters, upper and lowercase do, and the lowercase b works everywhere else...even when editing in vi from a terminal! Go figure! He used to be able to copy/paste a 'b' onto the command line but even that doesn't work now. The only time we can get a 'b' to show up is when using forward (tab) completion of a file/directory/app which contains one...but never one that BEGINS with it.

So, since I'm always giving him a ration of crap for being a bash user I exclaimed, "Yeah, it's probably because you're a bash user!" On that note, he logged into a cshell and viola...the letter 'b' works just fine?! Are you kidding me?

It's definitely not a finicky hardware problem...that's been ruled out. It's not a system-wide problem because the keystroke works when using vi in a terminal window and in other apps as well.

Has anyone seen/heard of this before? The easy work around is to just have him switch to csh or tcsh, but an explanation or conjecture would be amusing. By the way, it's RedHat Enterprise Linux (2.4.21-27.0.2.EL).

So, evidently, there is no 'b' in bash.

Cheers,

Bret

I believe that both vi and bash use the readline library, so that would rule out a problem with the readline key definitions.

There is a bash builtin command called bind that might be the culprit. Perhaps there is something in one of the bash startup files to uses it. The only other thing I can think of is if he is using a font-encoding that is incompete. Such as a sample font, or one extracted from a pdf file.