mjhjmtu

I'm working on a project that requires the use of a test framework called Appium in Java. The Appium library is attempting to run the following script on my machine to find out where my NodeJS install is located (not important that it is node):

#!bin/sh
OUTPUT="$(npm root -g)"
echo "$OUTPUT"
exit

This script is executed during my JUnit unit tests in Java explicitly with bash. See this link to see the code that Appium uses to run the script. On my system, if I execute this from a shell (using zsh, bash, or sh), I get the following output:

/home/me/node-v8.9.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules

Great. For some reason, when that same script is running in the environment that is set up by my IDE (IntelliJ), this is the output:

/home/me/node-v8.9.0-linux-x64/lib/node_modules

[H[2J

Regardless of whether or not this was a good idea on the part of Appium, its breaking because of the extra rrn[H[2J. I usually launch IntelliJ through a program called GnomeDO on Ubuntu MATE. After seeing that my $PATH in IntelliJ was different at run time than what I expected, I closed it out and launched it form my shell instead. The $PATH was right and the trailing output stopped.

What can be different about launching an application from my desktop environment in Linux and launching it from my shell that would lead to trailing non-readable characters?

Note: I've been theorizing in the comments and this captures those thoughts and a HIGHLY speculative conclusion.

The funky characters look suspiciously like the escape sequence that moves the cursor to the top (top-left?) of a terminal and then clears the screen. You can see this in action by doing this in a shell: echo -e 'e[He[2J'.

I did a little searching and found a few references to Gnome terminals having incomplete support for escape sequences and for the problem sequences characters looking just like ours (e.g. [H) are displayed

Combining those two facts leads to a theory:

1. Intellij emits some escape sequences upon opening a terminal window to clean the window up including e[He[2J.


2. Gnome DO sets up an environment that points to a particular terminal type and this is different from the terminal you use normally.


3. Intellij launches this terminal when it is launched from DO, emits escape sequences, then runs your script.

Ah but why does the escape sequence come after the output of the script. That does not necessarily mean that it was printed after the script output was printed. There could be other escape sequences emitted by Intellij that worked and they could have moved the cursor in such a way to make the lines appear seemingly out of sequence.

Again this is extreme speculation made without having all the facts...but see if you can find a Gnome terminal on your system that doesn't handle the echo command above or otherwise check my guess.