[ale] shell question

Björn Gustafsson bg-ale at bjorng.net
Thu Dec 11 19:19:09 EST 2008


The 'stty' command controls the terminal's start/stop characters as
well as other things like interrupt (^C) and suspend (^Z).  You can
both view the current settings and change them using stty.

# Show the current terminal settings

stty -a

# Change the stop character from ^S to ^R

stty stop '^r'

# Undefine the stop character. note the two single-quotes:

stty stop ''

2008/12/11 J. D. <jdonline at gmail.com>:
>
>
> 2008/12/11 Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us>
>>
>> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:07:36 -0500
>> "J. D." <jdonline at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > There are some curious key combinations in bash I was wondering about.
>> > Pressing ctrl-s seems to freeze the terminal but silently it appears
>> > to still be accepting input. Pressing ctrl-q breaks this behavior and
>> > everything returns to normal. Does anyone use this? I'm sure it has
>> > caused people trouble thinking their terminal is locked. I have only
>> > used ctrl-q from to regain my terminal after accidentally hitting
>> > ctrl-s. :)
>> >
>> > Also having scrolllock enabled on from switching computers on a kvm
>> > creates the illusion of a lockup since the terminal is in a scrolling
>> > mode.
>>
>> This is a historical feature of terminals, known as soft flow control.
>> One would often use it on a very slow serial terminal connection to
>> perform manual pagination of sorts.
>
> I see. That makes sense. I guess we use pagers for that now.
>
>>
>> Some software that runs in the terminal (such as Emacs) overrides that
>> behavior, since Emacs uses both C-s and C-q key combinations.  I am
>> relatively certain that means that there is a way to disable it
>> generally, but it's never been a problem for me so I don't know what
>> the process for that would be.
>>
>>
>
> Thanks for the suggestion. I use ctrl-d quite a bit and occasionally it
> becomes
> ctrl-s due to typo. Great presentation on DR by the way. I just read over
> it. Thanks
> for the link.
>
>>
>>      --- Mike
>>
>> --
>> My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
>> http://www.trausch.us/
>>
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>
>
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-- 
Björn Gustafsson



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