Xterm sometimes fail to wrap when typing

Question

When typing a long command (beyond the window edge) xterm will sometimes fail to wrap to a new line and instead begin writing over the current line. It's like it does a \r (carriage return) when it should have done a \n (new line).
The result is sort of what you'd get if you did 'echo -e "SOME_COMMAND_BLAH_BLAH_BLAH\rTHIS_SHOULD_BE_WRAPPED"'.
Of course this scrambles everything I do to an extend where xterm becomes unusable and often I have to close the corrupted xterm and open another. It's really starting to annoy me. I can't image what might cause this, but the problem seems to come up when I've been using the xterm for some time (some different tasks). Newly opened xterms are always fine.
Last edited by Lars Stokholm (2009-05-04 14:28:07)

Answer 1

Use 'reset' to fix a "broken" terminal instead of opening a new one, this should ease things. Terminal state can be altered by certain control sequences/characters, e.g. if you cat a binary file you're likely to end up with a terminal that needs a reset. Other than that, a bad PS1 string may cause readline to get confused about the available line space if escape sequences are not wrapped in \[ and \].