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Right now I am experiencing some very, very weird behaviour on a Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS server I am managing.

Connecting to the server over ssh either from cygwin(mintty) or a terminal on a Linux machine, I can't type the letter e.

I have done the following debugging:

  • The letter e can be typed in vim on the remote server
  • The letter e can be typed in the terminal on the local machines
  • $TERM is set to xterm
  • $LANG, $LANGUAGE and $LC_ALL are set to de_DE.utf8
  • locale charmap returns UTF-8

Right now, I am completely out of ideas what could be causing this.

I'd be very happy about some advice on how to fix this.

Zulakis
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    Thanks, @EricRenouf, this helped me solve the problem! Check my answer for details if you are interested. – Zulakis Jun 07 '15 at 13:18

1 Answers1

59

My problem is not the same as can't type lower cased e in amazon ec2 (Amazon Linux), but similar.

After checking /etc/inputrc and finding nothing out of the ordinary, I remembered that I did do some keybinding in the /etc/bash.bashrc. This was already there for a very long time and worked flawlessly, though. Why would it make problems now?

I found out when I checked /etc/bash.bashrc:

As all files are managed using ansible, this command had been inserted using ansible as well:

- name: Up Arrow Command Search
  lineinfile: dest=/etc/bash.bashrc line="bind '\"\e[A\"':history-search-backward"

- name: Down Arrow Command Search
  lineinfile: dest=/etc/bash.bashrc line="bind '\"\e[B\"':history-search-forward"

Apparantly, a recent ansible update changed the behaviour of lineinfile, so that the command resulted in 

bind \e[A:history-search-backward
bind \e[B:history-search-forward

instead of

bind '"\e[A"':history-search-backward
bind '"\e[B"':history-search-forward

And therefore resulted in the weird behaviour.

A big thanks goes to Eric Renouf, for his link to the other question with the similar problem!

Zulakis
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