15 Sep
2008
15 Sep
'08
12:40 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Dave McGuire once stated:
On Sep 14, 2008, at 10:49 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
Which, being Unix, is part of the kernel 8-P
Well, the Linux kernel expects the erase key to be ASCII 127, and has the
backspace key generate said character. The default xterm expects the erase
key to be ASCII 8 and doesn't know how to handle ASCII 127 that the
backspace key under Linux sends. And it drives me nuts!
That has nothing at all to do with the kernel; it's in the
terminal driver. You can control all of those special character
interpretations using stty. You can make the "erase" character
anything you want, even a regular alpha character, like 'X':
Yes, I know about that. The problem I have is that I regularly log onto
Linux servers using X-Windows (defaults to BS) under Linux (defaults to DEL)
and Mac OS-X (defaults to BS) equally, so half the time, I'm in the wrong
mode. I suppose I could come up with some shellrc magic to automagically
handle that for me, but I would have to add said automagic shellrc stuff to
over two dozen servers *and* make sure it works with Windows clients as
well (which wouldn't surprise me if sends BS as well).
I suppose it could be worse though ... at least Linux got rid of the old
System 6 (or was it through System 7?) convention of "@" erasing the current
line [1].
-spc (And this is reminding me of the complications I had to go through to
get to the computerized card catalog in college [2] from outside the
library [3] ... )
[1] Actually encountered that in the wild in the late 90s! I was amazed
that any Unix system still used that convention that long.
[2] Florida Atlantic University
[3] Dial into the local access point (I think it was Tymnet). Connect
to one system. Issue a one-letter command to log into another
system. Issue another command to get to a menu through which you
could select an option to finally log into the library computer.
It was only marginally easier than actually downloading files from
the CS department computers via the dialup lines.