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Accepted
Lance Roberts
Asked: 2011-08-20 11:37:35 +0800 CST

Ctrl+C won't close man pages

  • 772

I'm setting up a Linode server, and connecting to it via SSH with PuTTY.

When I bring up a man page, and don't want to go through the whole thing, I'm used to doing a Ctrl+C on the Unix boxes I've worked with. This doesn't do anything for me in this situation, and I end up having to close the window, and reconnect.

Is there a way to enable Ctrl+C to work normally, or is there a different key sequence in Ubuntu that will implement the break?

10.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can quit man (which uses less) by pressing q.

    • 12

  2. This incessant trapping of the interrupt signal (control C) has been bothering me for many years. When I hit CTRLC in a program, it's because I want keyboard control back, and I want that control back immediately, with prejudice. There's no reason for something like 'less' to ignore control C. It's a bad design decision.

    Fortunately, there's another key combination which is not (yet) being ignored by most programs: control-\. This sends an 'abort' signal which is generally not trapped that also serves to give you back control of your terminal.

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