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Andrei Serdeliuc
Asked: 2012-05-06 03:08:39 +0800 CST

Tmux send-keys stripping space

  • 772

I'm trying to run a series of commands in tmux from a remote file like so:

tmux $(wget -qO- http://example.com/tmux)

The file contains commands like split-window and send-keys

The problem is, send-keys is stripping spaces. The send-keys commands is:

send-keys ssh example.com C-m;

But instead it sends sshexample.com

Any idea why?

Cheers!

tmux

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As a guess, it's interpreting "send-keys ssh example.com C-m;" as four separate arguments and not knowing what to put between them.

    Try:

    tmux "$(wget -qO- http://example.com/tmux)"
    • 2

  2. It is not that send-keys is "stripping spaces" exactly, but that Space is one of the special keys recognized by tmux and expected to be used with the send-keys command.

    So, rather than

    send-keys ssh example.com C-m;

    in this case, you would use

    send-keys ssh Space example.com C-m;

    More on this can be found on tmux send-keys syntax

    • 1

  3. It's doing that because the <Space> key is considered a special character. To fix the issue, you need to escape the character by using the \ key.

    Let's say we want to send the command ipython --no-autoindent to the terminal. If we did it like this:

    tmux send-keys 'ipython --no-autoindent

    The output sent would be: $ ipython--no-autoindent

    ==================================

    This is how to send it with escaping the space:

    tmux send-keys 'ipython \ --no-autoindent'

    And if you try it, your output would be: $ ipython --no-autoindent

    • 0

  4. I've struggled a bit with similar issue. The solution turned out to be:

    tmux send-keys -l $var;
tmux send-keys C-m;

    thanks to -l, tmux paid attention to all the signs. On the downside, it didn't accept <enter> so separated call is required.

    • -1