By mistake I ran a funny command today that looks like vi filename | vi - . It made my terminal stuck even Ctrl-C was of no use. I had to close the terminal only. I tried it a couple of times and tried on my friend machine too. Just wondering why Ctrl-C was also not able to help.
3 Answers
vi is reading from stdin.
When you edit in vi Ctrl+c does not work either.
To quit vi use :q or :q! will work like in a normal vi session.
1 Comment
plaes
Thank you! I sometimes manage to call
vim file | foo and this seems to also hang the terminal.Using the POSIX function signal() a C program can choose what to do if there is a keyboard interrupt.
Here is an example (copied from this site):
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>
FILE *temp_file;
void leave(int sig);
main() {
(void) signal(SIGINT, leave);
temp_file = fopen("tmp", "w");
for(;;) {
/*
* Do things....
*/
printf("Ready...\n");
(void)getchar();
}
/* cant get here ... */
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
/*
* on receipt of SIGINT, close tmp file
*/
void leave(int sig) {
fprintf(temp_file,"\nInterrupted..\n");
fclose(temp_file);
exit(sig);
}
But as you can see, vi doesn't use the keyboard interrupt to exit. It doesn't matter whether you are using it in a pipe or not.
Comments
Vi intercepts ctrl-c (it is almost equivalent to esc) so ctrl-c would not work to quit the application in that setting.
I could escape from that trap by using ctrl-z and then using kill %
