1. Preface
Your terminal on Linux or OSX may end up to a bad state.
- You cat a binary file to terminal
- You interrupt pdb or some other application reading lines in a bad way
2. Symptoms
- New lines don’t work
- You cannot see your own typing to terminal
- Backspace stops working
3. Fix
Type command
stty sane
This may fix some problems without needing to restart the terminal. More info.
![\"\"](\"https://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon16x16.png\")
Subscribe to RSS feed ![](\"https://opensourcehacker.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-24.png\")
Follow me on Twitter
![](\"http://opensourcehacker.com/wp-content/uploads/facebook-24.png\")
Follow me on Facebook ![](\"https://opensourcehacker.com/wp-content/uploads/googleplus.png\")
Follow me Google+
reset is another command for resetting the terminal to a sane state.
Or tset.
Great suggestions. ‘tset’ seems to work best for me; ‘reset’ clears the terminal output, and ‘stty sane’ puts the prompt at the end of the current line [and is harder to type when invisible :)].
Thanks for this. Finally I don’t have to close misbehaving terminals anymore. 🙂
Can anyone explain *what* exactly screws up terminals when some program decides to spill binary onto them?
As far as I remember it’s caused by the program changing its own keyboard mapping expectations and then crashing without changing them back to match the shell.