091. Why Is the Screen Is All Full of Weird Characters Instead of Letters?
Description
This article is from the Frequently Asked Questions for Linux, the Free/Open Source UNIX-like operating system kernel that runs on many modern computer systems. Maintained by David C. Merrill with numerous contributions by others. (v1.0).
091. Why Is the Screen Is All Full of Weird Characters Instead of Letters?
A: You probably sent some binary data to your screen by mistake. Type echo 'c' to fix it. Many Linux distributions have a command, reset, that does this.
If that doesn't help, try a direct screen escape command: echo 'Ctrl-V Ctrl-O '.
This resets the default font of a Linux console. Remember to hold down the Control key and type the letter, instead of, for example, Ctrl, then V. The sequence Ctrl-V Esc C.
causes a full screen reset. If there's data left on the shell command line after typing a binary file, press Ctrl-C a few times to restore the shell command line.
Another possible command is an alias, sane, that can work with generic terminals:
$ alias sane='echo -e " c";tput is2; > stty sane line 1 rows $LINES columns $COLUMNS'
The alias is enclosed with open quotes (backticks), not single quotes. The line break is included here for clarity, and is not required.
Make sure that $LINES and $COLUMNS are defined in the environment with a command similar to this in ~/.cshrc or ~/.bashrc,
$ LINES=25; export $LINES; $COLUMNS=80; export $COLUMNS
using the correct numbers of $LINES and $COLUMNS for the terminal.
Finally, the output of stty -g can be used to create a shell script that will reset the terminal:
1. Save the output of stty -g to a file. In this example, the file is named termset:
$ stty -g >termset
The output of stty -g (the contents of termset) will look something like:
500:5:bd:8a3b:3:1c:7f:15:4:0:1:0:11:13:1a:0:12:f:17:16:0:0:73
2. Edit termset to become a shell script; adding an interpreter and stty
command:
#!/bin/bash stty 500:5:bd:8a3b:3:1c:7f:15:4:0:1:0:11:13:1a:0:12:f:17:16:0:0:73
3. Add executable permissions to termset and use as a shell script:
$ chmod +x termset $ ./termset
[Floyd L. Davidson, Bernhard Gabler]
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