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Other Special Characters

Here are two additional special characters that are meaningful on BSD systems.

Macro: int VDISCARD

This is the subscript for the DISCARD character in the special control character array. termios.c_cc[VDISCARD] holds the character itself.

The DISCARD character is recognized only when IEXTEN is set. Its effect is to toggle the discard-output flag. When this flag is set, all program output is discarded. Setting the flag also discards all output currently in the output buffer.

Macro: int VSTATUS

This is the subscript for the STATUS character in the special control character array. termios.c_cc[VSTATUS] holds the character itself.

The STATUS character's effect is to print out a status message about how the current process is running.

The STATUS character is recognized only when canonical mode. This is a peculiar design decision, since the STATUS character's meaning has nothing to do with input, but that's the way it was done.

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