konsole -e does not work due to pty problems

I can reproduce this error also with konsole 3.5.4-0ubuntu5 on Edgy and get the same error message as shown in Kenny's picture.

But strangly I have to put a whitespace after the ';', i.e. use

  konsole -e 'ls ; echo hi'

Otherwise I get an error "konsole: ERROR: can not execute ls;". But this seems unrelated to the pty issue of this bug report.

Here the pty related device permissions on my system:

$ ls -l /dev/ptmx
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 5, 2 2006-08-16 12:12 /dev/ptmx
$ ls -l /dev/pts
total 0
crw------- 1 andreas tty 136, 0 2006-08-16 12:19 0
crw------- 1 andreas tty 136, 1 2006-08-16 12:18 1
crw------- 1 andreas tty 136, 2 2006-08-16 10:28 2
crw------- 1 andreas tty 136, 3 2006-08-16 12:18 3
crw------- 1 andreas tty 136, 4 2006-08-16 12:12 4
crw--w---- 1 andreas tty 136, 5 2006-08-16 10:28 5
$ ls -ld /dev/pts
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2006-08-16 12:15 /dev/pts
$ ls -l /dev/pty*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 2, 176 2006-08-16 12:15 /dev/ptya0
...
The /dev/pty* devices all have the same ownership and permission.

I think this is no permission issue. When I try this as root user I get the same error.

> That brings up a message box indicating problems with the PTY configuration.

The error has nothing to do with PTY configuration. The Konsole code first checks to see if the executable exists and if it does then it assumes that any subsequent failures are a PTY related issue. This behaviour is not correct and will need to be fixed.

Konsole and xterm treat the -e option differently I believe. The following works in Konsole and xterm:

konsole -e sh -c "ls;echo hello;sleep 10"

I think in xterm the "sh -c" part is implicit.

> It's particularly annoying if x-terminal-emulator points to /usr/bin/konsole, since it
> works fine with xterm.

What is the use case?

Doesn't happen in KDE 4 anymore.