[ale] shell question

[Michael B. Trausch]

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.

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.

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
http://www.trausch.us/
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