UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I just found that the current command line will be cleared when trying to input the "@" sign to the terminal. I checked current alias, but found nothing.

Would you please provide some suggestion about it?

hmm.

See if there is some unusual terminal setting with @ - try the stty command. You can also try the reset command.

Hi.

Historical aside: the @ symbol was at one time often the choice for (line) kill:
Most commonly these days I have seen Control-U (sometimes written as ^U in stty output) used for that feature. Things have come a long way since 1990. These days we can usually edit the line interactively.

As Jim said, you can probably see what this is with stty -a, and possibly use that to fix it as well. There are a lot of confusing symbols and terms in man stty but that's the first place I would look.

Here's a fragment from my system:

Code:

$ stty -a
speed 38400 baud; rows 24; columns 80; line = 0;
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
                                   =======

Good luck ... cheers, drl

Just for grins set the line kill character to @ and see what happens. Don't forget to reset it to what it was before. Older UNIX's had the line kill character set to @ and the classic text "The UNIX Programming Environment" mentions it too.

Jim dr and shamrock, great thx for your comments. besides telling me the root cause, you also show me the history. Learned a lot from you.