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Control Characters To Change

On Sunday, January 3rd, 1988 the default control characters used by all the ECN systems will change. The intent of this change is to bring the ECN in line with the control characters most commonly used throughout the Purdue campus, as well as the entire Unix community world-wide.

The control characters currently in use throughout the ECN evolved at a time when no clear standard existed. Since then, a growing effort has been made to standardize many aspects on UNIX. It is clear that the control characters used in UNIX have become standard among all major manufacturers of UNIX equipment. The change to standard control characters will enhance the inter- operability of the ECN with remote systems, as well as provide an easier migration path for users entering and leaving the ECN environment.

The changes in control characters will be as follows:

Purpose         Old                     New
=============================================================
Character Erase ^h (Control-h)          ^? (Delete or Rubout)
Line Erase      ^x (Control-x)          ^u (Control-u)
Interrupt       ^? (Delete or Rubout)   ^c (Control-c)
=============================================================

We realize that the user community will require some time to adjust to this change. This is why we are trying to give such a long advance notice.

If you wish to change to the new control characters now in order to become familiar with them, you should add the following line to your ".login" and/or ".profile" file:

               stty erase '^?' kill '^u' intr '^c'

If you wish to continue using the current control characters even after the conversion, you should add the following line to your ".login" and/or ".profile" file:

               stty erase '^h' kill '^x' intr '^?'

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