Bug 146124

Summary: unexpected text echoed into terminal window, sometimes onto the command line
Product: [Applications] konsole Reporter: Lachele <lachele>
Component: generalAssignee: Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME    
Severity: normal    
Priority: NOR    
Version: 1.4.1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: unspecified   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Lachele 2007-05-29 19:35:51 UTC
Version:           1.4.1 (using KDE 3.3.1, compiled sources)
Compiler:          gcc version 3.3.4
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.4.27

I don't know how to make this reproduce.  I'm not even certain that it is a Konsole issue.  But, I figured I'd tell you anyway.

Lately, I've been working with two Konsoles open, each with five tabs.  Nine of those tabs are involved in ssh sessions to a remote machine.  The tenth tab is just a regular terminal on the local machine.  I use most of the tabs very often, so I'm jumping around a bit between them.

Sometimes, I notice strange characters echoed into the terminal window.  Typically, I recognize them as related to something I've been doing, but I don't expect them to be in the terminal when and how they are there.  Here are some examples of the behavior:

1]  I run a program that prints some debugging output to stdout (the terminal).  Most of the time, everything goes as normal.  But, once in a while, some of the output from the program will end up entered into the command line.  It is as if I had copied and pasted (with the mouse, for example), the output from the program onto the command line.  At first, I thought I might have done that somehow.  But, I'm not really sure how I could have done that, even accidentally.  The mouse has three mouse buttons, no emulation, and the third is central scroll -- hard to paste and not realize it.  Plus, it was many lines of text that were sent to the command line -- just to highlight all that would have taken conscious effort.  I save 1000 lines of history, and they were almost all taken up.

2]  A portion of a man page showed up in the terminal window.  I had not accessed the man page recently, and didn't even recognize the program/file/etc. the page was written for.  But, I might have accessed it at some point and forgotten it.  For example, hitting "K" in vim will take you to a man page for the word under the cursor, if one exists.  It's possible I had done that accidentally.

3]  Bits of files that I've been working on (vim) get altered.  Typically, some portion gets added or deleted.  Again, at first I thought I was just being incredibly bad at typing/pasting.  But, then a file's contents disappeared entirely and was replaced by half of another file.  I'd had both files opened during the session just before I noticed.  While file changes like this can happen on the remote machine, they can also easily occur, in strange ways, if random text is echoed to a terminal window while vim is in command mode.  On the other hand, I -think- I remember exiting both files before backing them up (the backed up versions were fine), but it was late...

So far, this only seems to happen within/between ssh sessions to the remote server, which makes it likely to be a problem on the remote machine.  But, other users on that machine have not mentioned similar problems (I asked).  So, it might be on my end.  

I saw another bug listed that mentions text getting inappropriately highlighted when choosing a window.  Perhaps this is related, though I haven't noticed that particular behavior.
Comment 1 Robert Knight 2007-07-24 19:58:49 UTC
Can you still reproduce this?  Does the problem occur with other terminal programs such as xterm?
Comment 2 Lachele 2007-07-24 22:29:00 UTC
Profuse apologies for not getting back to you.  It wasn't quite xterm.  

There was, on the remote system, an old virtual machine running.  It was no longer in use, and I'm not quite sure why it was still running.  But, after I killed it, all the strange happenings stopped.

Thank you so much for asking.
Comment 3 Lachele 2007-07-24 22:32:49 UTC
It wouldn't exactly reproduce -- that is, it rarely did the same thing twice.  But, as the problem grew, it became increasingly apparent that it was on the remote system.  I'll call this resolved unless you see some reason to do otherwise.