Line wrap on embedded system issues carriage return but no linefeed

I'm working on a terminal I/O bug in my embedded linux system. When the data typed on the shell via a terminal serial UART connection exceeds 80 lines, further input continues at the beginning of the same line rather than jumping down to the next, overwriting the initial data entered.

Everything else about the terminal I/O works correctly and this issue is not present over a remote telnet session.

Can anyone venture a guess as to why this might be happening? Keywords and search terms would be greatly appreciated as well, since admittedly I don't have a great understanding of how the terminal display works within the kernel and I'm not sure where to start. Thanks!

I've seen similar behavior in bash if ansi color codes aren't escaped properly in the PS1 prompt. The escape codes must be enclosed in \[ and \] brackets.

This, and other similar behaviors, usually result from a mismatch between what the shell &/or application expects as a terminal type, and what the actual terminal (more commonly, terminal emulator, these days) is. I've worked at solving these kinds of problems, and have never really developed a fool-proof method to solve them. I think part of the difficulty is that there are different ways of setting and configuring terminal settings (termcap vs terminfo), and also there are varying degrees of compatibility by various terminal emulations. The command stty can often be used to fix row/column settings (as well as many other configurations).
I would love to find a really good tutorial that explains all of the underlying mechanisms and related utilities well enough that I could use it to fix these kinds of problems.
--- rod.

Thanks for the response guys. You both are suggesting that the issue is in the terminal application (this issue occurs in all PC host-side applications: teratermpro, hyperterm, secureCRT, etc.) or in the shell formatting. Does it make sense to rule out the possibility of how kernel console graphics is configured being the cause?

I've done a little more research and found this little wikipedia entry offers a brief overview of the console system in linux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_console
I know bugs in the kernel are very very rare, especially in systems like this that are near the core of the kernel. Again, I don't know exactly how it works, but is there a setting in the kernel config that can affect this system?

Originally Posted by crunchytheory Thanks for the response guys. You both are suggesting that the issue is in the terminal application

No, I'm suggesting that there is a difference between what kind of terminal is being emulated, and what kind of terminal your shell &/or application thinks exists. Or perhaps a disagreement about the size (number of lines) of the terminal. Have you tried something like

stty rows 50

(use whatever number makes sense to you; see what effect it has). A link with some interesting information, but little that ever seems to help resolve problems like yours is
Text-Terminal-HOWTO

--- rod.