Re: terminal goes funky
Morten Liebach <morten@mail1.stofanet.dk> writes:
> On Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 09:38:07PM +0200, Sven Burgener wrote:
> > Silly me accidentally cat'ed a binary file, which caused the terminal
> > (tty1) to go all funky.
> >
> > It seems to display things fine, but just with weird characters instead
> > of proper ones. Some characters are fine though, like the "GNU" part of
> > the login prompt. :)
> >
> > I saw someone undoing a situation as such, but forgot how to do it as I
> > very seldom get bogged like this.
> >
> > A reboot would surely fix this, but I dont want to do that. Kill or
> > HUP'ing the getty doesn't do the job.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Sven
>
> He, I think this is interesting. I haven't tried it myself in Linux, but
> it has been a problem in some snapshots of OpenBSD that I have used, and
> it surfaced on a mailinglist that it's an age-old artifact in UNIX.
> On OpenBSD I've seen the same that you see, all normal chars garbled,
> and all capitals are OK, also (again on OpenBSD) I've seen a bug that
> made ALL chars capital, annoying, and that's also an old old bug, funny
> that such things doesn't disapear with time and, in the case of Linux,
> reimplementation.
> On OpenBSD the only thing that fixed it was a reboot, YMMV.
Not a bug in Linux, or a lot of other Unices I've seen. It happens
when you cat a binary file that happens to have some binary sequences
that tweak your terminal settings.
Just type "reset" at the prompt and it should go back to normal. If
you're in X and this is an xterminal you can put the mouse in the X
terminal window, hold the Ctrl key while clicking the middle mouse
button and you should get a menu. Select the "Do Full Reset" and that
should cure it.
Gary
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