Command Line Terminal – How to Permanently Disable Ctrl-S

Hmmm... The problem seems to have disappeared after I did the following:

1. did another yum update which installed the kernel-2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64 package and its associated kernel-firmware package
2. applied the universal Microsoft fix from a few years ago - I kicked everyone off and rebooted the server (VM)

(There were also updates to samba4-libs, xorg-x11-drv-ati-firmware, kernel-devel and kernel-headers packages but I doubt any of these are significant.)

I can see from the output from "last" that I had already rebooted the server on the same morning I wrote this question, which leads me to believe that the kernel update fixed the problem. The patterns "kernel*" and "*firmware*" are specifically excluded from the auto-update process in the default configuration of the (Scientific Linux) yum-autoupdate package, so if I had installed the updates manually, I may never have seen the problem. I've never seen this kind of behaviour before, in fact I can't remember seeing any noticeable side-effects from kernel updates before, so that's a new one for me.

My question is, does Ctrl+s keep the command running?

Yes, up to the point where the system buffers fill, and the process starts blocking to be able to write to the terminal. So, it won't run indefinitely. Plus you won't be able to run anything else in the same terminal since the output is blocked.

To switch away from the program while still keeping it possible to come back, the choices are:

• Run another terminal on the side (another Putty, another SSH connection)
• Run screen or tmux to multiplex multiple "windows" inside the same terminal
• Redirect the output to a file, run the command in the background and then peek at the file when you want to: tar cvf ... > /tmp/tar.out & and tail /tmp/tar.out