bash: command not found after piping

I believe I can shed some light on this issue. Since I bought my first MacBook Pro in 2009 I've occasionally seen this problem, but I've not let it me bother me too much as I could work around it. Even when buying a new MBP earlier this year I got the same problem. Now I do a lot of programming in Java using Eclipse. And the few times I use the OR operator (pipe symbol) the space after it will be underlined, indicating an illegal character. So what I do is to step back. Delete the character and type space. I figured this was just some quirk in Eclipse and did not connect the two until today.

So I tried the same when in the shell when typing a command with several pipes - and the command worked! I took a look at the command in a hex editor and strangely found "7CCA" instead of "7C20" ("|" followed by a space). Playing around with the hex editor I also saw that holding Alt+7+Space together always produced "CA".

Now I have Norwegian keyboards so I suspect that there is some software issue which is also present when using German keyboards.

I filed a bug report with Apple; describing this problem. Let's hope we can start typing at our normal pace, instead of resting every time after a pipe.

[Deleted my message to repost via preferred account.]

On most keyboard layouts, typing Option-Space produces a non-breaking space character (NO-BREAK SPACE Unicode: U+00A0, UTF-8: C2 A0). Since typing a pipe with your keyboard layout requires using the Option modifier key, you're likely not releasing it before typing the subsequent space.

I've been programming for close to 20 years and I'm a pretty fast typer. So that is quite likely. This is fairly annoying though so I think there should be away to avoid it. Maybe by adjusting keyboard settings. I've got more use for pipe space than U+00A0.

Thanks for the hint! I occasionally experienced the same problem and yes, it's because I typed Option-Space.

The issue is that you're accidentally pressing the Option modifier key and typing Option-Space, which enters a non-breaking space, which isn't recognized by the shell. You can configure bash to treat non-breaking spaces as regular spaces by putting the following in ~/.inputrc:

# Map (UTF-8) non-breaking space to regular space, in case the user

# accidentally types Option-Space when they meant Space.

"\xC2\xA0": " "

Good find. Too bad Linc unsubscribed from the thread, he might have learned something. I guess when you are a Level 9 you must feel you are above learning new answers, and 'reinstalling the OS is the only option. Good work for sticking with it and finding the 'real' answer

I guess when you're level 1 you haven't learned how frustrating it is to reason with someone whose mind is set on doing something against their own best interests. Sometimes being mule-headed gets someplace useful, but mostly it just digs deeper holes.

This is why the sollution is not "reinstall your system". Figuring out what's actually happening instead is a much better approach generally in IT. Thanks to the guys who went that way I know what has been bothering for about a years time, thanks guys 🙂

YayBjorn,

The other scenario where I have seen grep return the error "No Such file or Directory" is when you have a misconfigured environment variable:

For example if we add the following line to .bash_profile

set GREP_OPTIONS=="--color=always"

and then run [ source .bash_profile; /bin/ps ax | /usr/bin/grep -i grep ] we get the error...

$ source .bash_profile; /bin/ps ax | /usr/bin/grep -i grep

grep: grep: No such file or directory

if we edit the .bash_profile and remove the second '=' sign

set GREP_OPTIONS="--color=always"

and then rerun the command [ source .bash_profile; /bin/ps ax | /usr/bin/grep -i grep ] we get no errors

$ source .bash_profile; /bin/ps ax | /usr/bin/grep -i grep

78631 s001 S+ 0:00.00 /usr/bin/grep -i grep

I had the same problem.

Thou it was just me hitting "Alt+[Space]" occasionally. That _looks_ the same but isnt...

Peter,

Also, any syntax error inside the GREP_OPTIONS environment variable quotes will result in a "No such file or directory" frustration when piping to grep.

Wrong:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto -extended-regexp'

Correct:

export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto --extended-regexp'

Thanks so much, that you found out!

That really annoyed me and I did not get, that I did a "typing mistake".

But know I had an eye on it and yes, I do press alt+space!

Thanks!

You are not typing too fast, you type inaccurately. The reason you got that error is that you still had your fingers on a modifier key when pressing space.