why can't I get a prompt?
 

Sometimes when I expect to get a prompt... I don't. An example: I was reading a man page (haha, when am I not reading a man page?!), pressed q (my pager is less), and then... nothing happened. Another example: typed ps -ef, saw the usual stuff, no prompt at the end. Tried ^c, ^[ and neither did anything useful. Am I missing something totally basic here? (I don't know if this is helpful, but I think this doesn't happen in screen. I'm not *sure* that's the case, though.) Thanks!

~v

For man pages, you have to exit with esc : q [escape colon q]

For your ps command, if it doesn't end with a prompt, something is terribly terribly wrong here :p

Is that on Slackware or RH? If it's both places, then it's you, buddy. :p

What terminal are you using?

if youre using less as the pager, then q should quit and return you to the shell. Something is terribly wrong if thats the case..

If it's in Slackware, what is the version of Bash?

It's just in Slack. I'm using xterm and bash 3.00.16 (and I was wrong about it not happening with screen).

that's the right version. Does it happen in console mode?

Are you sure it's the right version? He should have build 4 of Bash 3.0, I think.

ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/slackwa...tches/packages

The version he has is the one that comes with the Slackware 10.2 installation.

I did bash --version and I got the same results as him. Anyway I think it's user error (not understanding how to get out of man) and maybe some other stuff too, and not a problem with bash.

Yes, indeed. And from the changelog:

"a/bash-3.0-i486-4.tgz: Fixed an obscure bug where suspending the first process
started in a new shell would cause it to hang.
Thanks to Grant Coady for discovering and fixing this bug."

Wow, thank you so much! :D

Does that mean you fixed something?