mintty, xterm and rxvt freezes when displaying a binary stream

[Adrian H <adrianh dot bsc at gmail dot com>]

I inadvertently dumped a binary stream to the terminal and it froze
mintty.  When I tried to kill the process dumping the data, it
wouldn't die, even when using -9 switch.  When I used Process Explorer
to kill it, it died and mintty resumed working.

I narrowed the stream down to 370 'lines' by catting the file and
heading and tailing its output.  For some reason, I wasn't able to
narrow it down any further.

This issue doesn't occur within cmd running bash (bash is what is
running through mintty when this occurred).

I've also tested it with xterm and rxvt and they also froze the
terminal, so it appears to be something to do with the terminal
interpreter which may be shared across these three terminal
programmes.

I've tried to attached the compressed narrowed down stream for you
viewing pleasure, but this mailing list doesn't support it. If anyone
wants to debug this further, just tell me where to put the binary file
and you can do your thing.

Not sure what that stream is doing to the terminal to do that to the
process, but I don't think it should be doing that.

Any idea what's happening?


Adrian

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