Ctrl+C does not work in gnome-terminal

Question

On my Linux host, Ctrl+C does not seem to work and I do not know how to proceed to make it work. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 with bash 4.1.5(1), and working in Gnome-terminal.

When I pressed Ctrl+C while this script was running, it did not cause it to quit.

#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 500`
do
        ps -e > /dev/null
        echo $i
done

Answer 1

Try to do this

$ stty sane

and see if it fixes the problem, also check if the intr is set correctly using

$ stty -a

If you find that intr is set to something different than ^C, then you can also fix it by typing

$ stty intr ^v^c

Answer 2

Since it looks like a broken gnome-terminal configuration, you can try letting it restore the defaults using

mv .gconf/apps/gnome-terminal{,-BROKEN}

(You'll need to re-start the terminal to see the effects.)

If everything is fine after that, do a rm -rf .gconf/apps/gnome-terminal-BROKEN.

Answer 3

I'm going to take a guess here: Ctrl-C does work, but because ps -e takes a long time to run relative to the rest of the script, that all you do is send SIGINT to the "ps" process. "ps" exits, and the script picks right up with another iteration through the loop code.

Do a sleep 10 in your bash window, while it runs, control-C it. See if that works. If it does, run your original script, and control-C it multiple times. Sooner or later, you'll get lucky and the bash process that interprets the script will get the SIGINT.

Answer 4

The default settings in gnome-terminal binds the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V keys to emulate the copy-and-paste behaviour of Windows. It was meant to be a feature not a bug :)

To disable this, at the gnome-terminal,

1. navigate to Menubar -> Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts
2. click on the Ctrl+C in the Shortcut Key column until you see New Accelerator....
3. press the Delete key to disable the key binding
4. verify that Disabled now appear in the Shortcut Key column.

Note that this change will be immediately effective on all gnome-terminals.

Tip: gnome-terminal --show-menubar will force gnome-terminal to show the Menubar if it is not shown.