How do I restore input echoing in the terminal?
Sometimes when a script gets killed at a password prompt, I can no longer see my input being echoed in the terminal. That is, normally at a terminal, I see this:
$ _
<after typing 'foobar':>
$ foobar_
But in this case, I don't see what I've typed.
I know that I can restart the terminal to get its regular settings back, but is there a way to restore input echo without a restart?
For bash I usually just type reset
and it fixes anything that was left "funny." Looks like it's also known as tset
but invoking each one does something a little different.
tset, reset - terminal initialization
When invoked as reset, tset sets cooked and echo modes, turns off
cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline translation and resets any unset
special characters to their default values before doing the terminal
initialization described above. This is useful after a program dies
leaving a terminal in an abnormal state. Note, you may have to type
<LF>reset<LF>
(the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the terminal to
work, as carriage-return may no longer work in the abnormal state.
Also, the terminal will often not echo the command.
Use the stty
command. Specifically, run this command:
stty echo
This will restore echo (printing input characters), which probably was turned off during the password prompt.
To see all your terminal settings, run stty -a
. While the input was hidden, that should show -echo
somewhere in the output. After the fix, it should instead show echo
in its place.