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bagpuss

Linux help needed

I suspect I am probably asking the wrong crowd but it can't hurt

I am currently running gnome on debian linux 3.1 on a hp intel machine at work and the all the terminals seem to have stop recognising the tab key

The keyboard driver is Generic 105-key (Intl) PC

This happening after my machine lost my networked home directory and stopped functioning. In order to resurrect the machine my gnome settings gconf had to be deleted.

Once I was logged in I was able to return the desktop toolbar to looking how it did, turn off the system bell and start work again

Unfortunately now terminals (I have tried the standard terminal, gnome multi term and xterm) have stopped putting any character on stdout when the tab key is pressed. This means that tab completion no longer works which as you may appreciated is more than a little annoying, ctrl D still works, alt-tab to switch between windows still works and the tab key still produces a response in editors like Vi and XEmacs and also in firefox and thunderbird so it isn't as straight forward as the keyboard mapping is wrong (it still appears to be standard UK)

Any ideas as to what might of gone wrong?, Restarting the machine doesn't seem to of worked

I have made inquiries with my own systems team but they haven't answered yet presumably as at the end of the day this isn't the end of the world

thanks
MarkS

all sorts of possibilities because there is so much stuff around keyboards / shells / terminfo / termcap / stty etc

edit - sorry - should have read this properly - you already answered some of these questions.

Is it just in a shell / terminal window ?

does alt-tab work to cycle round the windows ?

open a terminal and run

od -xc

type a few tabs and other characters then CTRL d

do you see /t and 09 ?
MarkS

running bash presumably ?

anything in the profile files ?
stty sane help ?
bagpuss

MarkS wrote:
running bash presumably ?

anything in the profile files ?
stty sane help ?


nope tcsh is standard here

which profiles and what should I be looking for?

not sure what you mean by stty sane?

thanks
bagpuss

MarkS wrote:
all sorts of possibilities because there is so much stuff around keyboards / shells / terminfo / termcap / stty etc

edit - sorry - should have read this properly - you already answered some of these questions.

Is it just in a shell / terminal window ?

does alt-tab work to cycle round the windows ?

open a terminal and run

od -xc

type a few tabs and other characters then CTRL d

do you see /t and 09 ?


yep. I got this

od -xc
lauraishere
0000000 0909 0909 6c09 7561 6172 7369 6568 6572
\t \t \t \t \t l a u r a i s h e r e

There were 5 tabs, as indicated b y the \t

alt tab works, and the tab key functionality seems fine in vi, xemacs, thunderbird and firefox

in the shell and when running a mysql client in the shell is when the tab seems not to work
MarkS

Ok,

narrows it down a bit. tab is there just not getting shown by the shell
Is it being eaten by the auto complete functionality ?

stty is a command to alter the terminal tty settings. the option sane sets it to 'sensible' defaults, and clears up a lot of strange rubbish.

like when someone comes along and changes the kill character when you arent looking. Wink

c - shell ? urgh Shocked .login .cshrc ? is that the config/startup file ?
whats your $TERM is that correct ? how does that match up with your termcap/terminfo

Its years since I had to play with this stuff
jema

stty sane Very Happy now that brings back memories, unfortunately 15 year old memories Rolling Eyes So I can't help much here either Sad
bagpuss

I will try stty sane,

I will open a new terminal first but is it likely to screw all my terminals if it doesn't work?

okay, stty sane seems to have recovered tab completion of environment variables but nothing else

$TERM is xterm
$SHELL is /bin/lstcsh

not sure what you mean by termcap/terminfo

thanks for this its a great help

EDIT: actually tab completion of environment variables seems to of always worked so stty sane didn't seem to change anything
jema

that makes sense, as stty sane is generally something that simply resets some basic stuff that can get messed up by applications.
MarkS

if auto completion is partially working that would imply that the auto completion is taking the tabs but isnt processing properly/fully?
what options do you have with set complete = xxx and does any of that help.

never used tcsh though so not sure how it differs from stuff I do use.
bagpuss

MarkS wrote:
if auto completion is partially working that would imply that the auto completion is taking the tabs but isnt processing properly/fully?
what options do you have with set complete = xxx and does any of that help.

never used tcsh though so not sure how it differs from stuff I do use.


unfortunately typing just set complete into the commandline doesn't give me anything useful neither does man complete or man set for that matter

if I just type set and look at complete it appears to be set to nothing

if I try running set complete on it doens't seem to alter anything neither does set complete enhance which was one of the options about.com suggested

thanks for trying
MarkS

googling for complete.tcsh brings up lots of sample stuff....

do you have a complete.tcsh ?

some stuff at http://www-sop.inria.fr/parallel/DR:/lsf/man/tcsh.1.html in sections 4 5 and 6 as well

how many shells does the work need?

If you cant manage with ksh and vi what hope is there ? Laughing
bagpuss

thanks for the pointer to complete.tcsh it hopefully will be useful

it does look like a method to make tab completion more comprehensive and intelligent though rather than switching it on in the first place

thanks
MarkS

I have never looked at autocompletion before - I cant see anything that does turn it on or off.

I found one link that talked about doing it when compiling the shell - but that might not be any good to you.

Everything else seems to be around it being there but doing different amounts of stuff - hence the .tcsh file.


sorry

:shrug:
What ! there isnt a :shrug: emoticon ?
bagpuss

MarkS wrote:
I have never looked at autocompletion before - I cant see anything that does turn it on or off.

I found one link that talked about doing it when compiling the shell - but that might not be any good to you.

Everything else seems to be around it being there but doing different amounts of stuff - hence the .tcsh file.


sorry

:shrug:
What ! there isnt a :shrug: emoticon ?


thanks for all your assistance its been much appreciated

tommorrow having had no response from my email today I am going to phone someone in systems and see if I get any further (I don't want to have to go into the office yet and actually speak to anyone, too many of them at once is a scary concept)
MarkS

Any answer ?

I do think autocompletion is on just not doing what it should. I think one of the scripts is missing. If you dont have any answers I'll try installing tcsh on a box and see what I get in the way of startups.

interesting that on bash autocompletion there is a script that set up the behaviour but then on bash there is documentation about completion.
bagpuss

yep, it appear I had mucked up the keybinding using by gnome multiterm when adding a couple of useful shortcuts and some how this had affected all the terminal programs

all fixed now thankfully, it only took them 3 days to get round to it of course
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