Back to original question - why does my prompt change to "arg: 3" when I hit Alt+3?

[Christian Dywan]

Am Fri, 5 Nov 2010 11:31:16 +0000
schrieb Chris G <cl at isbd.net>:

> OK, so Alt+character doesn't work as I expect in xfce4-terminal.  :-)
> 
> Can anyone explain why it does what it does?  When I hit Alt+<digit>
> my bash prompt changes to "(arg: <digit>)", hitting further
> Alt+<digit> keys adds digits to the prompt so that hitting, for
> example, Alt+5, Alt+4, Alt+3, Alt+2 gives me a prompt (arg: 5432).
> 
> Ah, what it does is to repeat the next character entered arg times,
> what an extremely un-useful facility, does anyone have any idea where
> it comes from?  It's not from bash because the same thing happens
> within my editor. 

I suggest you read the manual page of your command line interpreter.

It's a bash feature and not at all related to Terminal.

-- 
ciao,
    Christian