Linux Terminal: typing feedback gone, line breaks not displayed

linux bash terminal putty gnome-terminal

38,867

Solution 1

Execute the command reset and your terminal should be restored (reference).

This issue happens generally when dumping binary data to the terminal STDOUT which when the escape codes received are processed can do anything from change the color of the text, disable echo, even change character set.

The easy way to avoid this is to ensure you do not dump unknown binary data to the terminal, and if you must then convert it to hexadecimal to ensure it doesn't change the terminal settings.

Solution 2

To elaborate on Joshua Briefman's answer, executing reset -c will only reset the control characters responsible for your problem:

tset, reset - terminal initialization

Usage: tset [options] [terminal]

Options:
  -c          set control characters
  -e ch       erase character
  -I          no initialization strings
  -i ch       interrupt character
  -k ch       kill character
  -m mapping  map identifier to type
  -Q          do not output control key settings
  -r          display term on stderr
  -s          output TERM set command
  -V          print curses-version
  -w          set window-size

Also note the following form the command's manual:

Note, you may have to type
<LF>reset<LF>
(the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the terminal to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in the abnormal state. Also, the terminal will often not echo the command.

38,867

Author by

E.Z.

Updated on August 27, 2020

Comments

E.Z. over 3 years
From time to time I have to run a command-line tool (a Python script) whose output seems to break my terminal. After the execution is finished, the typing feedback is gone (I can't see what I'm typing), and also line breaks are not displayed. This happens if the terminal is started remotely via Putty, and also locally when using gnome-terminal.

For example, after the problem happens, if I type ENTER pwd ENTER, I would expect to see:
```
[userA@host006 ~]$
[userA@host006 ~]$ pwd
/home/userA
[userA@host006 ~]$
```
But actually the output is:
```
[userA@host006 ~]$ [userA@host006 ~]$ /home/userA
                                                             [userA@host006 ~]$
```
The only way to fix it is to close that terminal and start a new one.

Maybe be related: the script output contains some terminal-based formatting (e.g. invert foreground/background to highlight some status messages). If I dump this output to a file I can see things like [07mSome Message Here[0m.

Any ideas what I could do to prevent this?
- Admin almost 11 years
  
  You seem to be in a subshell that you need to exit from to get back to your original terminal. Just try exit;pwd
- Jim Garrison almost 11 years
  
  This is off-topic for SO; belongs on Unix & Linux or Super User. That said, you can usually fix a broken terminal session by blind typing stty sane, which restores your terminal to 'sane' settings.
- cabad almost 11 years
  
  Also, when you have terminal problems, you can try fixing them using reset or stty sane.
- Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com about 7 years
  
  related askubuntu.com/questions/171449/…
dusan about 7 years

Thanks a lot! In my case running ipython inside a Kubernetes container didn't show the typed input, executing reset fixed it.
Minh Thai over 6 years

I have the same issue when I execute bash x.sh inside a ssh shell. reset does help but if I execute the .sh file again, the issue reappears. Do you have any idea? (the .sh file basically just execute sbt package to build my scala project)