Why do I see the weird backspace behaviour on my shell sometimes?

Posted by Lazer on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Lazer
Published on 2011-01-04T17:24:30Z Indexed on 2011/01/04 17:56 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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bash

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unix

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shell

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backspace

I use bash shell and sometimes all of a sudded, my Backspace key stops working (when this happens Ctrl + Backspace still works fine)

I am not sure why this happens, but it also carries over to any vim sessions that I use from the shell. To my surprise, getting a fresh shell does not help, and the problem seems to go away as abruptly as it started.

This is what the typed characters look like, each Backspace keypress is shown by a ^? on the shell

$ cat filem^?namr^?e

Does anybody have a clue what might be happening? How can I restore the normal behaviour?

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