@ Character Being Treated as Carriage Return

[Steve Lowe (IL)]

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

[Jonathan Fife]

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

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

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 ...

[Steve Lowe (IL)]

Updated /etc/profile:

stty kill "^U"

for the standard user login