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Resetting PuTTY / Terminal after viewing a binary file

Submitted by Druss on Tue, 2012-02-07 00:17

If you've been working with Linux terminals for a while, you've invariably found that viewing a binary file tends to output a lot of hieroglyphic nonsense (when all you want to do is check its header) and for some petty collateral damage, rapes your screen by changing your command prompt and window title to more of the same gibberish. While a lot of people (*raises hand*) simply accept such rowdy behaviour as one of the vagaries of life and simple open a new terminal window or similar, this - as I found out a few minutes ago - can be fixed.

One of Bing's many minions informed me that this can be resolved by one of the following:

  • Running the command reset.
  • or, if that didn't work (as it is wont to sometimes), type the curious combination of CTRL + V, CTRL + O, and then hitting Enter.

One of these should work and did in my limited tests with both a Linux terminal as well as in PuTTY.

Hope this helps some soul somewhere :)