BASH: �ls: command not found when typing 'ñ' by mistake

Question

When I erroneously type 'ñ' (expecting to type any command) and then remove it and type the correct letter, the output returns the command with a special character attached �, obviously the shell don't recognize the command and I must re-type it being careful not to type again the 'ñ' character.

e.g.

Wrong typing       @tachomi:~$ ñs
Correct typing     @tachomi:~$ ls
Output             �ls: command not found

• Why is this happening since I removed the wrong character?
• How can I solve this?

What I think is that this kind of characters ñ , ' etc are not compatible with the shell being this the reason that the "memory" keeps something that it doesn't recognize, but I want to be sure why is this happening.

I'm using bash shell

Answer 1

You have a terminal (or terminal emulator) which understands multibyte encodings (probably UTF-8), but a shell which doesn't. Try setting the environment variable LANG to C.UTF-8. Or run locale -a to find another likely value to try.

Answer 2

Due to all help, I could find out how to fix this.

The main issue is due to the UTF-8 encoding, the server didn't have it configured as said in comments.

Quoting comments:

[@Rmano]: In UTF-8, ñ is a two-bytes char

[@jimmij]: backspace character for some reason deletes only one of them

[@aecolley]: Try setting the environment variable LANG to C.UTF-8

This is fixed as follows:

Find your current LANG    $ locale -v | grep 'LANG='
Output                    LANG=en_US
Change                    $ sudo LANG=en_US.UTF-8
or
Change                    $ sudo vim /etc/default/locale
Edit                      ~LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

Restart your terminal session.

Answer 3

You could run the following line of code:

if [[$(locale -v | grep 'LANG=') != *.UTF-8]]; then sudo $(locale -v | grep 'LANG=').UTF-8; fi

If the character code is not already UTF-8, it will set the character code to the UTF-8 version of the current character code. This way, the shell will understand UTF-8 characters, and will backspace them properly.