topic @ Character Being Treated as Carriage Return in Operating System - HP-UX

@ Character Being Treated as Carriage Return

Steve Lowe (IL) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:54:47 GMT

Have a user who is using the vi editor. To enter a the '@' character, she must enter a '\' character. I thought we have cloned the accounts correctly.

What parameter do I need to look for?
What setup change is needed?

Steve in Illinois

Re: @ Character Being Treated as Carriage Return

Jonathan Fife — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:02:51 GMT

If you type 'stty -a' at the commandline, does it show @ for EOL, kill, intr, anything?

If it does, you probably need to redefine it (perhaps in the user's .profile):
stty eol (or whatever)

eg.

stty eol

Will change it from using @ as EOL to using ctrl+@

HTH

Re: @ Character Being Treated as Carriage Return

Bill Hassell — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:02:55 GMT

Actually, the @ symbol is (by default) a line cancel, not a carriage return. So, when you type an email address, the @ simply cancels everything you just typed.

Now there are many solutions, the most painful is to ask users to type the following command:

stty erase "^H" kill "^U"

which will temporarily fis the problem. (note that the backspace key won't appear to work either until you type the above command.

Now to make this permanent, you need to add it to /etc/profile, but this only works when you login normally. An abnormal login would be Xwindows. You'll need to provide your HP-UX version and how users are logging in (ie, Xwindows like CDE, xterm, dtterm, etc) or telnet or ...

Re: @ Character Being Treated as Carriage Return

Steve Lowe (IL) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:56:51 GMT

Updated /etc/profile:

stty kill "^U"

for the standard user login