Re: some unknown bug, says : command not found

[Dennis Williamson]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2021, 3:46 PM Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> wrote:

> 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.
>


I only get a non-breaking space and a space between the colons rather than
three space characters.

>