Ken Irving wrote the following on 01/30/2009 01:30 PM:
All of the terminal windows are bash sessions started with the same shortcut. As far as I can tell they all started malfunctioning at the same time and all started working again at the same time. Of course not every command that I type takes more than one line so it would be hard to tell exactly when the problem started. I do know that starting/opening another window fixed the problem in all of the open windows/sessions.It might be useful to compare the terminal settings in the `bad' vs `good' cases, e.g., using stty -a > bad, etc.. You might be able to find something to tweak to fix that particular problem. Well behaved programs should return the terminal to its original state, but maybe that didn't happen. Killing programs with the KILL (-9)signal would probably have this effect, vs using the default TERM (-15).
More likely opening another window fetched a clean version of some module or control file that they all use.
Thanks for the insight! I'll remember to use TERM when I have to kill so errant process. It might save me a headache in the future!