Back in 2004, when I was very young and inexperienced,
I came in contact with a veterane system administrator.
We good-naturely nick named him "Zoidberg" because of
his mustache and nerdy behaviours. He knew a lot - he
probably still does, I never met him since.
I watched while he was working to some administration
task, learning as much as I could.
At one point, his shell went apeshit (I don't remember
why, I guess he visualized some binary file on the
screen), so he reset the terminal by echoing the ^V^O
sequence. He obtained pretty much the same as
reset(1), but it felt definitely old-school.
You can try this, btw: just run
dd if=/dev/random count=100
a few times, until you get your shell fucked up, then
(blindly) type
echo ^V^O`
I've used this trick for years. The general idea is
that ^V can be used to escape whatever character
follows. Today I realized I don't know how the ^V
functionality is colloquially called.
A quick search tells me that the (most common[2]) name
is "verbatim insert".
Fun fact: ducking[1] for "verbatim insert" results in
questions by newbies who would like to PASTE in their
terminal emulators.
[1] By that I mean searching in duck duck go. [2]
Citation needed.
