Command not found after pipe

Question

I'm using OS X Mavericks with zsh (technically the package oh-my-zsh).

I've been facing this bug for some time now and haven't found a way to fix it. Sometimes when I pipe a command it just says command not found.

For example, when I do a nmap network list scan like so nmap -sL 192.168.2.0/24 | grep ')' I sometimes get the error zsh: command not found: grep. Even when I use arrow up button it won't work, so I have to rewrite the command, exactly the same, and it will work.

It is really annoying and it has happened occasionally with other commands and mostly after a pipe.

Any idea why this is occurring?

Possible duplicate of [Bash piping in OSX prompts command not found, sometimes](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8694442/bash-piping-in-osx-prompts-command-not-found-sometimes) — tripleee, Nov 14 '17 at 12:57

score 172 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 12 '16 at 12:33

172

The fact that it's happening only sometimes indicates that your input actually varies (subtly) from time to time.

It depends on what kind of keyboard you have, but I think it's likely that you're accidentally holding down the Alt key while you type the space after the pipe. Alt+Space is a non-breaking space, which zsh won't recognise.

answered Jan 12 '16 at 12:33

Stephan

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holy *hit, you are right. Thank you so much. To easy to be sawn >. – Obi-Wan Jan 12 '16 at 12:40
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Elementary, Watson. – Esteban Jun 23 '16 at 21:11
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Perfect, thanks for this. My terminal does not show the "ugly space" that brakes it. – fisehara May 14 '19 at 07:30
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Came here in 2021 to be baffled about this. Thanks. – JHH Nov 10 '21 at 13:06
For what is worth, it also happens on debian bash with a PC (french) keyboard with [Alt gr] + space... Since [Alt gr] is necessary to produce the pipe on this keyboard, that happens quite often to me. – aka.nice Feb 28 '23 at 16:08

score 24 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 30 '20 at 14:59

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This is common error which happened in mac OS X when you copy ans paste command line. what you can do is to delete the space before and after the |

for example kubectl get pods | grep bla-bla-bla is now kubectl get pods|grep bla-bla-bla

hope that's help

answered Sep 30 '20 at 14:59

thelastworm

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very weird behaviour – maoizm Feb 07 '23 at 09:04

Command not found after pipe

2 Answers2