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Re: cat'ing a binary does some really funky things with my display



On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Mark Wright wrote:

> Every once in a while, I will mistakenly 'cat' a binary.  This almost always
> results in my console going haywire.  Now most text appears as graphic
> characters (blocks, arrows, lines - all that extended ascii stuff).  I have
> no idea, short of a re-boot, how to recover my console.  Any idea what's
> happening?

Certain control characters can change the font mapping or character set 
used by the console. There's various ways to fix it, my favorite is "tput
reset" (because it's the only one i remember offhand).

Look at the Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO (in /usr/doc/HOWTO if you have
doc-linux-text or doc-linux-html) for more information.


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