03 March 2005 6 comments Linux
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.
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.
You just saved my frozen session. Thanks.
Thank you - this has been bothering me forever.