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I use emacs in -nw mode on a computer cluster, and was using Emacs v25. I asked my sys admin to install a newer version (27 or higher) because global-display-line-numbers-mode was apparently not supported before version 27.

My sys admin then apparently installed Emacs v28.1 through conda

Since then, whenever I start up emacs I get the following error message in *Messages*

Wrong type argument: filenamep, "/scratch2/software/anaconda/envs/emacs/share/info^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^\
@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@\
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@/" [24 times]

The error message does not appear when invoking -Q nw or -q nw

What does this mean??

The computer cluster OS: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

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  • 1
    Do you see that if you start Emacs with emacs -Q -nw? If not, do you see it with emacs -q -nw? If the answers are no and yes, respectively, then contact the person who installed Emacs and defined the site-wide files. See the Emacs manual, node Initial Options.
    – Drew
    Jul 4, 2022 at 22:12
  • Each ^@ is probably a null byte. My first guess would be that there's a corrupted file behind that, because that string value is all kinds of wrong.
    – phils
    Jul 5, 2022 at 3:00
  • @phils I originally meant when I run emacs path/to/some/file. But I just tested just opening emacs without opening a file at the same time, and then it gives me that error as well. When I then open a file via C-x C-f it doesn't return any errors. So it is just when opening emacs! I've adjusted the opening post
    – Joran Martijn
    Jul 5, 2022 at 13:56
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    @Drew I do not see it if I start with -Q -nw and I also do not see it with -q -nw. So I'm guessing it must be related with loading ~/.emacs.d/init.el ?
    – Joran Martijn
    Jul 5, 2022 at 14:10
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    Note that commenting out your init file won't stop Emacs from initializing the package system and any ELPA packages you have installed (nor from loading default.el and site-start.el libraries, which would typically live elsewhere on the system; but I believe those are both loaded under -q so it sounds like those aren't the issue). You could try renaming your .emacs.d directory, and/or setting package-enable-at-startup to nil in early-init.el
    – phils
    Jul 6, 2022 at 13:54

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
5

I had the exact same problem and managed to fix it by setting INFOPATH in my .bashrc to the path that's causing the problem, so in OP's case that would be:

export INFOPATH=/scratch2/software/anaconda/envs/emacs/share/info

I'm still not sure where Emacs is getting the garbaged version of that path from, but this seems to override it.

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