Bug in xterm?

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 02:07:51PM +0000, Brian Candler wrote:
> I can cause xterm to hang reliably with the following command:
> 
>   perl -mDigest::MD5 -e 'print pack("H*",Digest::MD5::md5("test"))'
> 
> A control-middlebutton-"Do Full Reset" is needed to get out of this state.

It's not a bug in xterm on itself. If you cat a binary file you
might end up in the same situation.

    [~] edwin at k7>perl -mDigest::MD5 -e 'print pack("H*",Digest::MD5::md5("test"))' | hexdump -C
    00000000  9f 4d f1 3c ae 73 67 46                           |.M.<.sgF|

This shows that it outputs some high-ascii data, which causes the
xterm to stop output. If you do "echo hi > /tmp/aaa" while in this
state (be alert for typos), you see that it still accepts commands,
but doesn't show them anymore.

In other words, don't worry too much about it but make sure you
redirect binary output to files or pipes and not the console.

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/