backspace makes a ^H character
At work we have an old database we log into using rxvt terminal with ssh -X. When accessing the system from a Debian 8 machine the backspace key works normal but on my new system with Debian 10 and my Ubuntu 18.04 laptop, the backspace keys prints a ^H on the screen. To delete a character I have press Ctrl and h keys. How can I make this work with Debian 10.
I've been reading about this but honestly i feel like im just going into a rabbit hole. I don't know if i need to change something on the server side or my desktop. This is also happening to my coworkers that just moved to Debian 10. Thanks. |
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It is a well-known problem that some terminal emulators use "^?" and others "^h" (in both cases that is a ^ followed by the next char). |
It is probably a matter of the terminal emulator you are using. You say the database is old so it may be expecting something older than what you are using. See if you have xterm installed. If so, try it. If not, try installing it and using it. There are a number of terminal emulators out there so try different ones, and check the configuration files to see what they use for the backspace. At a guess I would say your database computer is expecting a VT100 terminal. If you check the configuration file you will probably find that backspace sends an ascii-8 character or an ascii-128 character. Whichever it sends, change it to the other and see what happens.
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my-debian-desktop~$ cat /path/to/launcher Code:
my-debian-desktop~$ cat /Launchers/SSH_database Code:
#stty erase ^? |
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And note (from another of your messages): Quote:
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# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells. |
doesn't the inputrc and .inputrc file deal with keyboard stuff like this? so if the 'shortcut' key is wrong in its deffs then it acts up like that?
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...dline-commands |
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And given that it works one way in Debian 8 and another way in Debian 10 and Ubuntu 18.04, why can't you grab the stty attributes and compare? |
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any ideas?
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Looks the same in both systems.
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erik@topaz:~$ stty |
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The stty was originally written for those real terminals on Unix systems Quote:
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erik@topaz:~$ stty -a |
So I know there's a lot of data there and I've found that while each side usually reports things in a similar arrangement, because one has certain things and does not have other things, the sequencing all does appear mixed up between A and B.
I'd check the most likely differences that seem to be related to terminal behavior, and that's unfortunately a lot of them. Many years ago I had some behavior that wasn't working for me uniformly, these stty settings, if you can guess, also apply to serial terminals and USB serial terminals. I actually had a program which glitched on certain data and my solution was finally to use what they call -raw mode. That is an actual mode for stty, or actually termios(3) which is what all this is related to. That's the programming side of things just so you know. In the end, I was attaching and trying different settings +parenb -parenb, you can set those on or off using + or -. And I found a few key things which affected the behaviors related to my specific problem. The other thing is I fully trust those outputs you have, never paid enough attention, but notice how it says "erase = ^?", there? I'd give CTRL-? a try just for a test. Sorry, I know there's no easy answers here, I'd actually start with setting it to +raw mode and see how it behaves. |
for gnome terminal there is a setting: backspace generates ^H, DEL or something else. Probably you need to configure your terminal emulator software to handle the keypress correctly. Probably you need to configure the virtual terminal to catch what was sent by the emulator and act on that event (this is the stty command).
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