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Many times I accidentally run the cat command on files that have contents up to few thousand lines.
I try to kill the cat command with Ctrl+ C or Ctrl+Z, but both only take effect after the total output of cat is displayed in the terminal, so I have to wait till cat gets completely executed.
Is there a better solution that avoids waiting? Because sometimes the files are up to size of 100MBs, and it gets irritating to wait for it.
I am using tcsh.
If the file(s) in question contain lots of data, sending the signal can actually get to cat before it finishes. What you really observe is the finite speed of your terminal - cat sends the data to the terminal and it takes some time for the terminal to display all of it.
Remember that it usually has to redraw the whole output window for each line of output (i.e. move the contents of the window one line up and print the next line at the bottom). While there are techniques and algorithms to make this faster than if it was done the straightforward way, it still takes some time.
Thus, if you want to get rid of the output as quickly as possible, hide the terminal window, because then (usually) no actual redrawing takes place. In a graphical environment this can mean either minimizing the window or switching to a different virtual desktop, on the Linux virtual console just switch to another one ((Ctrl +)Alt + Fx).
Also notice that if you ran this over a slow network link (SSH over a GSM connection, for example), you would definitely see much less output before cat is killed by the signal, because the speed of the terminal redrawing wouldn't be the bottleneck any more.
~? to see the available options (~. closes).
tty-stop-output. You can then send Ctrl+C. To resume output, press Ctrl+Q ...
Jan 1, 2015 at 17:52
I reckon this is more to do with the way the terminal is set up, than with any buffering issue. Check the output of stty -a | grep intr, you should have intr = ^C; on the output line if Ctrl-C is enabled at the tty/pty. If it isn't, you can use stty intr ^C to enable it. Add the line to your .tcshrc or .login to make it permanent (or delete the line that changes it in the first place!).
Failing Ctrl-C, you can also try sending SIGQUIT with Ctrl-\. If this doesn't work, again check stty -a | grep quit to see if it is properly set up.
Also check the settings for your terminal emulator (if you are using one), it may be that there is a shortcut set up at this level (maybe for copy or something) and the Ctrl-C does not reach the pty level. A shortcut could also be set up somewhere else in your desktop environment or Window system.
A good test on Linux if you are using a terminal emulator is to switch to a Linux console (Ctrl-Alt-F1), login there and see if the same behaviour occurs. If it doesn't then this suggests the problem lies with your Window system or terminal emulator.
It could be an issue with the delay between data being read from the pty device as suggested by peterph. But if this is the case and you do actually have to wait minutes for the data to be displayed, then surely the terminal emulator is buffering way too much data (or your PC is very slow). The answer would be to find a way to reduce that buffer size in your terminal emulator settings or use a different one.
Something else worth adding; I usually end up in the runaway cat situation when if I accidentally cat a binary file. The other effect of this can be to screw up your terminal settings (if the binary data happens to match various terminal escape codes which it often does). If tput is installed (usually is by default), you can avoid having to restart with the following command:
tput reset
This is what tmux option c0-change-interval and c0-change-trigger designed for. You should use a screen manager for resumable session anyway.
The Ctrl-O option has been in Unix since the 110 baud days. Runaway cat commands were always a problem when a long ASCII file was dumped at the slow output device and the the entire file placed in the device driver output buffer. Ctrl-O would start the flush of the buffer and a follow up Ctrl-O would toggle off the flush so the cat could be read at normal speed. Ctrl-O was entered and the entire file would flush and quickly return a command prompt.
Whether or not Linux device driver coders felt the need to continue to add this feature is unknown. This feature was added at the device driver level where Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q could only be implemented. I used this to dump large debugging runs with lots of check print and then scroll down to the place I needed to see.
open a new console, for example by clicking onto the console icon or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2. There, enter
killall -9 cat
and cat will be killed unless you have a stale NFS lock or an "uninterruptible sleep" situation (read on a bad sector with no timeout set).
cat, it's about what cat has written to the terminal before dying and has not been read let alone processed or displayed by the terminal emulator yet (and is sitting in a (around 64kiB large on Linux) buffer inside the pty driver).
Jan 1, 2015 at 19:54
drop_caches controls pages used as cache by the kernel (usually for a file system), not internal buffers of terminals, network drivers and such - if it did, it would have quite grave consequences as Stéphane pointed out (basically you would lose data).
killall -9 cat also kill any other cat instances that might still be doing good things in other process threads?
When using bash, you can suspend the job using Ctrl+Z and then kill it, either using the PID or by following the answers from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1624691/linux-kill-background-task (e.g. kill -9 %%)
tcsh and Ctrl+Z is not working... already stated that in question.
Jan 1, 2015 at 13:55
You can try with this
Reset the display use ctrl-j
If cat is still running then open a new terminal and run this pkill -9 -f cat " This will kill all cat processes. "
pkill -f cat on my desktop would kill the system tray area of Xfce4's taskbar.
curiositycommand...alias curiosity='sudo killall cat'