# Forward slash will not appear in xterm, system beeps



## skypher (Mar 26, 2009)

Hello,
I posted this to the FreeBSD X11 mailing list roughly one week ago and have yet to recieve a reply. I still have not found a solution to the problem or have any reasonable idea as to what is causing the problem.

I cannot get the forward slash character to appear in xterm. When I type the forward slash character ('/') in xterm I get a system beep, and the character will not appear. This is only a problem in xterm, as I can use the forward slash character fine in the system login terminal (before I startx).

Unfortunately this is all that I can tell you about the problem, as this is really all that I have to work with (no error message is generated, making me wonder if I have somehow enabled some undesired functionality?). I tried a make deinstall and make reinstall clean on X11, but it didn't fix the problem, the forward slash still does not appear.

I'm still learning FreeBSD and UNIX in general, so this is now acting as a major roadblock in the learning process, and being as I have yet to find a solution, I can feel my motivation to learn UNIX starting to dwindle again. I can still use the forward slash in the system login terminal, but that's not why I installed X, and I feel as though if I can't get past simple problems like this that I will never succeed in the world of UNIX.

Any assistance with this problem at all would be much appreciated, I really don't want to give up on UNIX again. It seems as though everytime UNIX presents me a problem I get all frustrated and end up taking a big hissy fit that eventually results in it getting nuked from my hard drive :OO .

Like I said, any assistance at all here would be appreciated, as long as it will get me one step closer to the solution.



Thank-you!


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## gilinko (Mar 26, 2009)

The best way to learn is to problem solve, so see this as an opportunity to learn. Remember, we are all beginners sometime on ALL operating systems.

First of all, you need to provide more information about your system. What locale/language do you have set? Does the slash key work in other X based programs as a notpad, web browser etc? Does the slash key work in some other terminal emulator program other than xterm(like gnome-terminal et. al.)?

Also please provide the output of _locale -a_ from inside the terminal. This is probably an error in the xterm program and not a X11 problem, as recompiling X hasn't solved you problem.


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