Canonical

The "usual way", the "right way", the "acceptable way".

Usually this is used to refer to the way the designers of the program intended that you present input or use flags, etc.

You'll see "icanon" amid the output of stty. That means you are set to do "normal" erase and kill processing on your input lines. You may not notice any immediate difference if you change that, but it will bite you somewhere. I set -icanon and couldn't notice any difference at the command line, but the moment I ssh'd to another machine, things fell apart badly. Terminal characteristics and behavior can be quite confusing, and can vary widely between OSes: BSD and Sys V have some very different ideas in this area.

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