"John atkinson" atk31415@googlemail.com
It turns out that to the first character in the file there has been added a "Unicode byte-order mark" otherwise known, I am told, as a "zero-width non-breaking space". This by its nature is not a printable character nor a visible one. It is one, however, devilishly difficult to get rid of on a permanent basis. Following directions I tried, starting with the command "locale". The output indeed ended with "UTF8", the initial cause, I understand, of all the trouble.
I would expect the byte-order mark shouldn't cause trouble if the whole system is UTF8, which SuSE 10 probably is. What directions are you following?
This is 'Finally, edit the file $HOME /.bash_profile [...]
You may not have that file already, so create it if it doesn't exist.
The slow reply was because most html email goes to the spam folder.
Hope you've solved it already,