Suspend and resume output in terminal
03 March 2005
4 comments
Linux
http://acs.ucsd.edu/info/stty.sunos.php
To some people it's obvious but I just learnt this now. It's bugged me several times where I've accidently pressed Ctrl-S and the terminal freezes. I had no idea what to do so I had to close the window with Alt-F4. This is extra annoying if you have a ssh session open.
What Ctrl-S does it that it freezes the output on the terminal. Ctrl-Q resumes it again. I can't think of a real usage for me for this but it's good to know if you accidently "freeze" your terminal.
Comments
I use this many times every day. When you run a big task that dumps lots of lines (at varying speeds), and you want to read or highlight some text in the output, hit ctrl-s to freeze the console before reading the text. You can still scroll around in the terminal's buffer.
or you could pipe the output into 'less'.
Ctrl-S is useless on modern machines and serves only to frustrate and annoy.
pressing scrollock in most terminals should have the same effect
Thanks for the useful inputs.