Re: some unknown bug, says : command not found

[Greg Wooledge]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2021 at 03:23:15AM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
>     Date:        Mon, 1 Nov 2021 12:03:48 -0400
>     From:        Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>
>     Message-ID:  <YYAP5PynR6Us/FV/@wooledge.org>
> 
>   | > bash: : command not found
>   | > bash: : command not found
>   |
>   | Because this is you, I can't be sure whether you are correctly pasting
>   | the output from your terminal into email,
> 
> Actually, because it is him, it is more likely that he has "cat" aliased
> to ' ' somehow, since he loves aliases so much.

Not a bad guess, but I can't reproduce it that way:

unicorn:~$ bash
unicorn:~$ alias cat=' '
unicorn:~$ cat /dev/null
bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
unicorn:~$ alias cat=''
unicorn:~$ cat /dev/null
bash: /dev/null: Permission denied

Then I tried with a non-breaking space, and that's closer, but....

unicorn:~$ alias cat=' '
unicorn:~$ cat /dev/null
bash:   : command not found

The "space nbsp space" in that result is interesting, but I don't think
that's what he's doing, even accounting for the possiblity that he
typed one space where the terminal shows three.