You can't paste enter into a Linux terminal
linux · 6 comments · 300 words
I love my Linux laptop. But, once in a while, it forgets it has a keyboard. I wake it from a little nap and it's all like "no, sir! no keyboards here! just use a mouse please!"
Logging in is pretty simple. Pop_OS has an on-screen keyboard which lets me hunt-n-peck P4ssW0rd123! into the box.
But then I'm stuck. I can launch apps - but I can't type into them.
The on-screen keyboard only seems to work on certain OS elements. It didn't pop up for the Terminal app.
I could have plugged in a USB keyboard. Or even a Yubikey. But where's the fun in that? Similarly, I could have rebooted and manually changed Bash's behaviour. Or done some weird config which turns a middle click into an enter. Or SSH'd in from another machine. But I like a challenge!
So I opened up my browser, clicked to a news story, and then laboriously copied and pasted the letters l s u s b into the terminal. That would show me if my keyboard was stolen by goblins.
But how to run the command? I found a newline on the web page and c&p'd that.
Nothing.
And that's how I learned that most modern terminals don't let you paste in an enter. It becomes a newline to stop you automatically running code you shouldn't. This is the default behaviour on Bash since 5.1.
Anyway, there's a long running bug about this intermittently glitchy keyboard behaviour. In future, I'll just reboot.
Ivan says:
More comments on Mastodon.