When I copy and paste text between applications sometimes bogus invisible characters get introduced that really screw things up.

Simply re-typing the characters fixes the problem.

What’s happening

When I copy unix commands from my notes in MS Word to invisible characters are actually present that I can’t see and these cause problems.

For example, My notes might have this command:

ls -l /tmp

But when I copy/paste it to the UNIX command line I get:

ls -l /tmp 
/bin/ls: cannot access '/tmp ': No such file or directory

The solution

This UNIX command seemed to fix the problem for me tr -cd ‘\11\12\15\40-\176’ < input-file > clean-file