Thanks choroba, but in trying to replicate the problem, I think some unwanted control characters got put into my shell.

I was looking at Removing non-printing (hex codes) from text files and ran at the following code as an experiment: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

$s .= chr for 1..255;
print $s,"\n\n";

$s =~ tr/\x20-\x7f//cd;
print $s,"\n\n";

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Only after running that code in a terminal, will the ?1 execution work as I describe. If that code is not run first, the ?1 acts normally, saying "file not found".

So that opens a new question, how do those hidden control codes get saved for the next execution in that terminal?

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

In reply to Re: OT: a bash shell oddity, need explanation by zentara
in thread OT: a bash shell oddity, need explanation by zentara

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