I can foresee a new phenomenon arising in stackoverflow-style sites and coding d...

probably_wrong · on Oct 23, 2015

I actually almost submitted something in that vein once. I'd type

  > ls | wc -l

and get

  > bash:  wc: command not found

As it turns out, I need Alt+1 to type a pipe character in my keyboard. If I'm not quick enough releasing the Alt key, I'll type Alt+Space instead of just Space, which inserts a Non-breaking space[1] in Mac. This character is not a space, and therefore it gave me a weird "command not found" error.

This lasted for months until I found out what the problem was - given that it was a combination of my keyboard settings and OS, finding the root of the error took quite some time. The hint? The "command not found" error had an extra space in front of the unknown command.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space

TazeTSchnitzel · on Oct 23, 2015

This bit me as well, as I mentioned in a comment above. The solution I found best was to make OS X not produce an NBSP on alt+space.

po1nter · on Oct 23, 2015

That should be a comment.

pierrec · on Oct 23, 2015

True, except in the rare situation where the question really features a code sample containing some evil homographs.

Edit: Oh hey, I actually found one that fits the bill:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14925894/trouble-with-arg...