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Learning Unix for Mac OS X, Second Edition
book

Learning Unix for Mac OS X, Second Edition

by Brian Jepson, Dave Taylor
December 2002
Beginner content levelBeginner
160 pages
4h 22m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Unix for Mac OS X, Second Edition

The Unresponsive Terminal

During your Unix session, your terminal may not respond when you type a command, or the display on your screen may stop at an unusual place. That’s called a “hung” or “frozen” terminal or session. Note that most of the techniques in this section apply to a terminal window, but not to non-terminal windows such as a web browser.

A session can hang for several reasons. For instance, your computer can get too busy; the Terminal application has to wait its turn. In that case, your session starts by itself after a few moments. You should not try to “un-hang” the session by entering extra commands, because those commands will all take effect after Terminal comes back to life.

Tip

If your display becomes garbled, press Control-L. In the shell, this will clear the screen and display the prompt. In a full-screen program, such as a text editor, it will redraw the screen.

If the system doesn’t respond for quite a while (how long that is depends on your individual situation; ask other users about their experiences), the following solutions usually work. Try the following steps in the order shown until the system responds:

Press the Return key once.

You may have typed text at a prompt (for example, a command line at a shell prompt) but haven’t yet pressed Return to say that you’re done typing and your text should be interpreted.

Try job control (see Chapter 9); type Control-Z.

This control key sequence suspends a program that may be running and gives you a shell prompt. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004702Catalog PageErrata