Morten Liebach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
