Suspend and resume output in terminal

03 March 2005 6 comments Linux

http://acs.ucsd.edu/info/stty.sunos.php

This blog post is 12 years old! Most likely, it's content is outdated. Especially if it's technical.

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.

Anonymous

12 April 2005

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.

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Anonymous

19 April 2006

or you could pipe the output into 'less'.
Ctrl-S is useless on modern machines and serves only to frustrate and annoy.

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Anonymous

14 November 2006

pressing scrollock in most terminals should have the same effect

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Anonymous

11 November 2009

Thanks for the useful inputs.

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Anonymous

18 August 2012

You just saved my frozen session. Thanks.

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Anonymous

25 August 2012

Thank you - this has been bothering me forever.

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Suspend and resume output in terminal

http://acs.ucsd.edu/info/stty.sunos.php

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