Terminal question

[ro23]

In the process of playing with the bash shell and learning what certain commands can do i ran across something with the more command. i ran it on a file with the extension .aspx, i didn't think that it would read the file but wanted to see what would happen. Well my terminal went a little haywire and i ended up typing in weird characters. I had to shut down the terminal and restart it. Later i learned of the reset command and used it to fix it after i tried again. What i want to know is what is this and why does it happen? It peaked my curiosity.

[GNU-Fan]

Let's look back 20 or 30 years back in time. Computers were cabinet sized boxes humming in the basement or a separate climate controlled room.

The users talked to these computers via terminals, often some distance away. The only connection was a small cable or a telephone line. When the computer sent a character, it was printed on the user's terminal.

In the beginning, the terminals were simple electronic (but mechanical!) typewriters. So all it could understand was characters, figures, newline, space and little more.

But over the time the terminals got more sophisticated. They could, for example, now display characters in different colors. Because the manufacturers wanted to maintain a certain level of compatibility they needed the terminal to behave like this:
a) if a normal character arrives, just display/print it on the current position
b) if a special character arrives, don't display it nor the next one, but instead evaluate it as a special command, like changing the color to red

This special characters are called escape characters.
ANSI escape code - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They change the behaviour of the terminal. As today's terminal programs are basically the heirs of the teletypes, if you send random stuff (like binary files) to them by calling more, you will possibly end up with the terminal being in a unusable state and need a reset

[vickey_20]

the same thing happened with me here a link to the post http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...tml#post683180

[ro23]

Thanks guys, that makes sense. I appreciate the info, now on to bigger and better linux mysteries.