stty

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

<operating system> (set teletype) The Unix command to change the behaviour of a terminal device driver or "tty".

Text you type at the command line (shell), and text output by commands, is processed by "tty" device driver software. The name "tty" is a historical reference to physical teletype devices once used for input and output. These days a "tty" is more likely to be connected to a terminal window on a graphical desktop but many of the same options still apply.

The stty command allows you to set many different aspects of the operation of a tty. This includes things like:

* whether characters you type are echoed (output) back to you (this might be turned off when entering a password)

* output of newline characters (Unix software expects lines to end with a single line feed character but it will typically be entered as a return and output as return and line feed, the tty handles this translation).

* handling the interrupt or "break" character, normally control-C. Typing this should stop execution of the current running program so the tty needs to handle it even when not expecting input.

Unix manual page: stty(1).

(2020-05-09)