On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Mark Wright wrote: > Every once in a while, I will mistakenly 'cat' a binary. This almost always > results in my console going haywire. Now most text appears as graphic > characters (blocks, arrows, lines - all that extended ascii stuff). I have > no idea, short of a re-boot, how to recover my console. Any idea what's > happening?
Certain control characters can change the font mapping or character set used by the console. There's various ways to fix it, my favorite is "tput reset" (because it's the only one i remember offhand). Look at the Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO (in /usr/doc/HOWTO if you have doc-linux-text or doc-linux-html) for more information.
