It's not a bug in dialog: when dialog's in the background, it relies upon the terminal modes remaining as-is. bash resets the terminal modes, breaking some of the optimizations used by ncurses. That's going to happen anytime you have two programs with different notions of what the terminal's doing. A user recently asked about a similar case, where it was possible to fool bash by changing the terminal mode to raw in the script (so that bash can detect it).
** Changed in: dialog (Ubuntu) Status: New => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1502538 Title: dialog displays misplaced characters with tailboxbg To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dialog/+bug/1502538/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs