line starve


line starve

(MIT, opposite of line feed) 1. To feed paper through aprinter the wrong way by one line (most printers can't dothis). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to theprevious line of the screen. "To print "X squared", you justoutput "X", line starve, "2", line feed." (The line starvecauses the "2" to appear on the line above the "X", and theline feed gets back to the original line.)

2. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminalto perform this action. ASCII 26, also called SUB orcontrol-Z, was one common line-starve character in the daysbefore microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard.Unlike "line feed", "line starve" is *not* standard ASCIIterminology. Even among hackers it is considered silly.

3. (Proposed) A sequence such as \\c (used in System Vecho, as well as nroff and troff) that suppresses anewline or other character(s) that would normally beemitted.