Linux Mint Forums

I'm not sure how it happened, but after using the upgrade manager and doing a reboot yesterday, when I hit the left arrow cursor key it outputs a hyphen character. This happens in all applications, not just bash but also eg. firefox (even while typing this post, aggravating). I am running Linux Mint 13 KDE.

I ran cat and checked all the cursor keys, and sure enough I can see the dash being generated. Here is what I get:

Up arrow - ^[[A^[[3~
Down arrow - ^[[B
Left arrow - ^[[D-
Right arrow - ^[[C^C

Note the extraneous "-" on the down arrow cursor key. For some reason, the extra characters on the Up and Right arrows don't seem to cause a problem. Can anyone suggest a place to fix this? I thought it might be in the X Window System's keyboard map, but this happens on the consoles as well. It happens whether the TERM is xterm or linux, so I am thinking it isn't a terminfo problem.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.

Just a quick update. It turns out that the up arrow DOES cause problems in some programs. For example, I can only go down in the list of packages in dselect. When I try to cursor up, the line above is highlighted for a second and then the selection drops back down.

If no one can give me a clue where to make changes to fix this then I will have to reinstall, but that seems like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. I am still hoping someone has a suggestion for what I should reconfigure.