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I keep getting a terminal all set up with a login and several exported environmental variables, and then I type a command wrong and get trapped. Is there something I can type to get back without closing the terminal and doing it all over?

I don't know why it can't just tell me I typed it wrong and tell me to do it again instead of giving me a blank line with no clue of what I should type next.

What I have tried:

Typing random things and hitting enter.
A Google search that turned up nothing because I don't know the technical term for what's happening.
Posted
Updated 29-Jul-17 5:42am
v3

Try ctrl-Z followed by
bg
<return> - that will put the current process into the background, and you should get your terminal back.

Typing
jobs
should list your current background jobs. You can bring a job back to the foreground by typing
%n
where n is the job number listed by the jobs command.

ctrl-C should interrupt your current process.

There are probably some places where ctrl-Z means something to the program . . . so to be safe you probably need to know what it is that has caused you to get trapped . . .

I think this should probably work in most shells - certainly bash and tcsh. If you're using something else YMMV.

Good luck. It's worth the learning curve.
 
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DBPatric 4-Jul-16 16:02pm    
Thanks. I pressed ctrl-z and it immediately stopped it. Terminal suddenly got 10x easier to use! I will try to be more careful typing commands correctly in the future though.
 
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DBPatric 4-Jul-16 16:03pm    
I can tell from the title that isn't it. It's not frozen, it's stuck. I can type letters, but they do nothing. I can see how my question might be a tad ambiguous because I'm not sure if there isn't a technical term for what I'm experiencing. Thanks though.
Richard MacCutchan 5-Jul-16 3:19am    
I have hit this problem in the past and it was generally due to hitting Ctrl-S by mistake. From your description it is impossible to guess anything else.

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