0

I ran across this accidentally when selecting a text row from a mySql database that contained several of the left double quote ( “ &#8220; ) and right double quote ( ” &#8221; ) characters. Probably whoever entered the text copied from Word and pasted into the HTML <textarea>.

Anyway, the text between the last ” and “ were not displayed, but instead the PuTTY window's title bar was changed to that substring.

The end part of the text was: The “s” on the end of the word “positions” can be removed (I think). New error message that pops up: “Cannot move the selected Division because...

And the window's title bar became can be removed (I think). New error message that pops up: â&#8364;.

I narrowed it down to the right double quote followed by the left double quote; anything between the two that would normally get printed instead becomes the window's title, excluding the first character after the right double quote. I'm unsure if it's specific to PuTTY or general to most shell programs. I don't know if it's specific to my PuTTY's internationalization/charset settings, or if it's specific to the Windows version(s) of PuTTY.

I tried looking up how to print special characters using echo -e, but it won't let me go beyond the ASCII range. I tried looking up special command characters that do something when printed, but couldn't find anything helpful besides bell (echo -e '\a', which causes the computer to beep). None of my other searches to try to determine why this happens and what would do it intentionally turned up no useful results.

So my question is, why do the left and right double quote characters trigger a title bar change in PuTTY when they're printed?

EDIT: To be clear, I am not asking how to get the characters to print correctly (I've found plenty of answers on that), but rather why those characters are being interpreted as commands.

4
  • What do you have Remote character set configured to in Putty Configuration -> Window -> Translation ? Aug 29, 2015 at 3:03
  • ptspts.blogspot.com/2012/11/… May also be relevant Aug 29, 2015 at 3:05
  • @ssnobody ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe) ...which happens to be the first item in the dropdown menu.
    – Mar
    Aug 29, 2015 at 22:03
  • Mine is set to UTF-8... Aug 30, 2015 at 2:10

1 Answer 1

1

PuTTY title can indeed be changed remotely.

You can disable this in Terminal > Features > Disable remote-controlled window title changing.

Why are the quotes interpreted as the command to change the title is difficult to say as I cannot reproduce that.

You seem to be using an old version of PuTTY as you claim to have ISO-8859-1 as the first and the default character set. The recent versions of PuTTY use UTF-8.

1
  • I'm on PuTTY 0.62, 3 versions behind the current version 0.65. Since it seems my set-up (whether due to PuTTY version or previous co-worker who had this computer) had a poorly-chosen default charset, I've updated all my sessions to use UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1.
    – Mar
    Aug 31, 2015 at 18:31

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .