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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

While this wouldn't have fixed this issue, this is why you should have:

    stty -ixon

In your .profile/shrc for your shell of choice. I've never needed flow control and never probably will, this stops that junk.

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Conversely: I use ^S and ^Q _all the time_. I've got a long-running program that's spewing output to a terminal? ^S and it stops so I can look at it, copy output elsewhere, etc. ^Q and it resumes again seamlessly.

It occurs to me that I grew up on the BBC Micro, where pressing Ctrl+Shift would pausing scrolling, so being able to do this is tightly engrained in muscle memory...

Fair enough, though I tend to just use tee and/or tmux for things like that. Just turn logging on if I'm curious and let things continue on their merry way.

Only time i've ever used it was when booting a system to stop output on a serial console. That was years ago and a one off basically.

In tmux ^b-] defaults to xoff too

This is why i have my ^b mapped to ^\ actually. :)

> Conversely: I use ^S and ^Q _all the time_. I've got a long-running program that's spewing output to a terminal? ^S and it stops so I can look at it, copy output elsewhere, etc. ^Q and it resumes again seamlessly.

Why not ^Z and `fg`? (I'm sure that there's a subtle or not-so-subtle difference, but I've only ever suspended, never XOFF'd, so I don't know it.)

^Z suspends the current application and returns to the program that ran it (typically the shell), which will then print a prompt. ^S and ^Q leave the output entirely undisturbed and unbroken.

Note that this enables you to use the bash 'forward search', CTRL+R's forgotten twin.

I use CTRL+R and CTRL+S often in emacs and was frustrated that CTRL+S would not work on a command line terminal. As the article mentions, CTRL+S is typically interpreted as XON. Turning that off will enable forward search.

I had a problem with scripts (reeeeeally hairy scripts with intertwined tcl and shell code, the tcl being used to drive some really obscure software) that failed when called from tcsh scripts which didn't have "-f" in them, and the user's .tcshrc had stty -ixon in it. I never figured out what the problem was...

Never needed flow control? Like, never?

Not much of a console user then, maybe? Because, like, cat /something is useless without page control.

Oh, maybe you're a speedreader?

I notice you are consistently a jerk when you write replies. Please stop being so snarky/sarcastic.

I never use flow control either, I just pipe it to less.

I looked through his comment history and I really can't agree with you, this one comment is funny given the speed of todays consoles (when in the past I could easily keep up). Maybe you're confusing him/her with some other user?

Well I apologize for being a consistent jerk, and I certainly appreciate your feedback. I'll try to upgrade the attitude.

I've only used flow control when booting systems like solaris on a serial console or other embedded hardware. Almost never for a tty session. I'm almost always saving output to a file and looking at that. Or using less +F or tmux etc... so yeah.

So my use of never might be hyperbolic, but it is a figure of speech. I can count on one hand with fingers leftover how often I've "needed" flow control. So just like in math, 0.99999 is equivalent functionally to 1 in this case.

I've been aware of XON/XOFF since forever, but I mostly just use my terminal's scrollback buffer.

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