Problems with the pound character

[bill purvis]

On Friday 07 December 2007, bill purvis wrote:
> For those who missed my earlier message, I'm having problems
> inputting the UK Pound Sign (£) in terminal windows.
> I've now decided the problem must be in the readline
> function. If I type:
> $ cat >xxx
> abcd££££
> ^D
> that works fine, so the basic input is working fine.
> It's only if I try to type
> $ echo 'abcd££££' >xxx
> that it plays up. I get as far as
> $ echo 'abcd
> then when I press the '£' key it kills the line,
> prepends a '#' character and then goes on to provide
> the next command prompt.
>
> I can't see anything in /etc/inputrc which directly
> explains this behaviour, and can find no mention in the
> info pages for readline.
>
At last -- I've discovered the readline init file has
a command, commented out by default in Ubuntu:

set convert-meta off

Apparently when 'convert-meta' is on, readline converts
any 8-bit characters to some 'meta-notation'
By turning this off, the pound sign (hex 0xA3) gets
passed through without being messed about. Don't see
why this meta-notation should be useful?

Bill


-- 
+---------------------------------------+
| Bill Purvis, Amateur Mathematician    |
|  email: bil at beeb.net                  |
|  http://bil.members.beeb.net          |
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