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It doesn't take too much time to type stty erase <back space> into your shell's .rc file.

Seriously people that have never used Unix suddenly think they are experts because they used linux. The basics is what Unix and Unix like Oses are all about.

Edited 2008-05-05 18:25 UTC

Please ask yourself what constructive reason there was to say such a thing. It is perfectly reasonable to expect not to have to edit your profile to make the backspace key work in the year 2008. Instead of placing the blame on the user, fix the problem. I have been a Unix admin for 20 years (next month) and have watched the damage done by arrogant, RTFM, blame the user attitudes for that entire time. As such attitudes, and associated attitudes which spring from them, held Unix back from its rightful place on the desktop as another OS achieved greater and greater market success in that area. IMO, we can no longer afford to harbor such attitudes.

I'm glad to hear that OpenSolaris will be setting 'erase' properly by default, or whatever fix they are planning.

Trifles make perfection but perfection is no trifle.

Edited 2008-05-05 19:05 UTC

Yeah, well, one can at least expect that a keyboard acts like it should act, that each key does what it was designed for, especially if it's one of the basic operations you kinda really need when using a command line.

But you shouldn't have to. Any organization with an ounce of attention to detail would already have done that for you.

If it would fail gracefully and not do anything that would be one thing, but it doesn't. It spits out characters.

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try that when I spin up a VM for Solaris. I do know that editing the .rc, or .cshrc, depending, file for the shell will load my preferences each time I login, but I haven't run into this problem outside of Solaris. Consequently, it's never been a priority for me to find a fix. Yes, I can read documentation and use a search engine.

Also, I couldn't implement the fix if I wanted to. I don't admin boxes, the standard for root is default, and there are 500+ boxes where I work. I don't want to change the shell when I'm work on recovering a crashed box. I'm not sure what will break, and I don't want to introduce variables.

There are perfectly good reasons I haven't found a solution to the problem, and none of them are related to me not knowing to the .rc file or my Linux usage.



I've never claimed to be a Unix expert, anywhere. I'm just happy Solaris will have an updated root shell, and I won't have to deal with that silliness if I decide to run it as my main OS.

I've used Unix, and Linux, Fedora, is the first Unix or Unix-like OS with the features to enable me to stick with it for a long period of time. I have to be able to get done what I need to get done. Which is the nice thing about Linux, it's Unix-like without making too many comfort sacrifices.

I use Linux to learn the fundamentals of Unix and Unix-like OSes. I threw threw myself into the deep end, so I couldn't retreat to a familiar OS. (I still have many OSes around, OS X, FreeBSD, Vista, XP, but I use Linux as my primary) Granted all the learning isn't one for one, but I learn the concepts.

It's the old Bourne shell that doesn't support backspace. You're still free to use any other shell, you can change it with usermod.

Indiana comes with ksh93 replacing sh and as default shell for root, and bash as shell for regular users. Both do support backspace.