Re: Delete key leaves ghost characters at command prompt in xterm

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc, in article
<t6sde5-7cr.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mark Hobley wrote:

Yeah. It's not doing it now I have restarted X, but it was definately
doing it before.

Was it doing so in all [n]xterms, or just one?

One thing I do remember from a long time ago on a Red Hat 5.0 system, is
that if you cat a binary file to the terminal window by mistake (often
due to binaries being placed in /etc or somewhere),

Happens also by catting or grepping a compressed (gzip or bzip2) file.

it was possible to screw the terminal up, causing the keyboard to input
incorrect characters, and output characters to be garbled (non-ascii).

In my experience (though I am not using LOCALE or LANG), the output of
the keyboard was unaffected, though the display of that output was
corrupted. i.e., you could run another command, such as ls, grep, or
an application such as Lynx, or a shell script - and that command o
application would run "normally" but the output would be trash. Moving
to a different xterm, or opening a new one behaved normally, without
the garbled output. Returning to the corrupted terminal made no
change to the garbage text output - it was still screwed.

Killing the offending user, rendered the virtual terminal session
screwed, because the keyboard would not provide correct characters at
the login prompt.

Never encountered that problem. The solution was to kill that terminal
session, or ^D out of the specific terminal (leaving the 10-30 other
xterms on the desktop unaffected), as this was the only terminal that
got trashed.

This affected virtual terminals, and was not specific to xterm. I can't
remember how xterm behaved in those circumstances. It was a long
time ago. But I am wondering if I might have cat a binary file by
mistake, or one of my files has control code in it that when displayed
screws up the blanking character in the terminal.

Can't say. I also never bothered to experiment, having found a usable
solution (killing the trashed terminal). I wonder if displaying a man
page (the pager used by man usually is configured to reset the display
to some specific mode) would display normally.

Old guy
.

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