Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: I've seen this problem occasionally over the years; I've seen it in 21.4.9, and I can't see anything that's changed between 21.4.9 and 21.4.10rc3 that would fix it. However, I can't reproduce it on demand. I'm installing 21.4.10rc3 now; if I manage to reproduce it there, I'll report it. However, this has reminded me of a couple of other shell-mode problems. First, signals sometimes cause characters to be lost; e.g. "C-c C-c ls RET" results in: $ ls $ bash: s: command not found Second, if you run a program which puts stdin into non-blocking mode, and it's still in non-blocking mode upon termination, the shell starts receiving garbage input. The problem can only be resolved by killing the shell-mode buffer (C-x k); also, the garbage gets dumped into ~/.bash_history. AFAICT, this is specific to bash (both 1.x and 2.x); however, it doesn't happen with xterm, rxvt, the linux console etc. -- Glynn Clements <glynn.clements(a)virgin.net&gt;