Special Control Characters

There are a number of other control characters that you can type that perform special functions. They are summarized in table . For example, if your program is caught in an infinite loop, you can kill the running program by typing a ^C. You can also kill the program using a ^$\backslash$. This makes the system create a file for you, called core, which is an image of the running program. You may want look at this to do postmortem debugging with the gdb debugger in order to find out what went wrong with the program, but you will want to remove the core file when you are finished because it takes up a lot of disk space.

Table: Common control characters

Control
Character	Function
CTRL-h	erase the last letter on this line
CTRL-w	erase the last word on this line
CTRL-u	erase the current line
CTRL-c	kill a running program
CTRL-$\backslash$	kill and dump core
CTRL-s	suspend output
CTRL-q	continue output
CTRL-d	End of File (often EOF)
CTRL-z	suspend program

If a program is spewing output at you and you want it to pause for a moment, but not kill the program, you can use ^S to stop output scrolling and ^Q to continue it when you're ready to read further. If you're inputting text to a program, the standard way of indicating the end of the text is with the End of Transmission character ^D.