fixing your terminal

I sometimes get into an odd state in screen. I am not sure what causes it, but it usually happens after I ctrl-C out of a console tool that wanted to do something odd with termcap. In this odd state the terminal no longer responds to the default control characters, like ctrl-H for erase.

Usually running reset does the trick and restores the terminal configuration. Well in screen, I found, this does not always work. I googled a bit and found a pretty neat article titled Unix Tip: Using stty to Your Advantage, which shows how to save the current state of the terminal and restore it later.

To store the configuration:

    $ echo stty `stty -g` > restore-tty
    $ chmod 755 restore-tty 

and when things mess up…

    $ ./restore-tty

It fixes my problems.