Bash – My bash shell doesn’t start a new line upon Return, and doesn’t show typed command

bashless

In my interactive bash shell run in lxterminal's window, I don't know what I have messed up.

Typing Return key doesn't start a new line, but Ctrl-C will.

$ ^C
$ $ $ $ $ ^C
$ ^C
$ $ $ $ $ $ $

When I type a command, although hitting Return key will execute it, the typed command is not visible.

Before that happened, I was running some command sudo lsof ... | less (or sudo netstat ... | less), and there seemed no output, so I hit ctrl-c and/or q multiple times in an arbitrary order. When I finally got out of less, that problem with bash happened.

Did I accidentally redirect the stdout of the shell somewhere else?

I don't want to close the shell, so is there some way to fix the problem? Thanks.

Best Answer

I think your terminal may be stuck in a “funny” mode. You probably can reset it with the /usr/bin/reset command, that normally comes with the ncurses library.

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Bash – most secure and simplest way to have a user-typed password on bash become part of stdin to a program

With bash or zsh:

unset -v password # make sure it's not exported
set +o allexport  # make sure variables are not automatically exported
IFS= read -rs password < /dev/tty &&
  printf '{"username":"myname","password":"%s"}\n' "$password" | cmd

Without IFS=, read would strip leading and trailing blanks from the password you type.

Without -r, it would process backslashes as a quoting character.

You want to make sure you only ever read from the terminal.

echo can't be used reliably. In bash and zsh, printf is builtin so that command line wouldn't show in the output of ps.

In bash, you need to quote $password as otherwise the split+glob operator is applied to it.

That's still wrong though as you'd need to encode that string as JSON. For instance, double-quote and backslash at least would be a problem. You probably need to worry about the encoding of those characters. Does your program expect UTF-8 strings? What does your terminal send?

To add a prompt string, with zsh:

IFS= read -rs 'password?Please enter a password: '

With bash:

IFS= read -rsp 'Please enter a password: ' password

Bash – How to expand filenames with Tab, even when a shell variable is used in the path

The issue was that the shell option direxpand was not set. The following solved the issue:

shopt -s direxpand

Best Answer

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Bash – most secure and simplest way to have a user-typed password on bash become part of stdin to a program

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