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plover

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Joined: 18/04/2013
Location: Australia
Posts: 306

Posted: 01:14pm 24 Mar 2019

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In an effort to get my mail accounts to connect properly to my ISP I am straining my brain to come to grips with manual testing of ISP mail server connection.

Running KDE Linux computer, opening a bash terminal which works fine. In this case I open a Telnet or OpenSSL session in the terminal.

I have discovered when I do this that the command line can no longer be navigated with the direction keys. For example moving character pointer left or right I get:

OpenSSL> ^[[A^[[B^[[D^[[C

[[D^, [[C^ in my case is the horizontal direction keys the other two vertical. I vaguely remembered something about some terminal work on this forum able to do something similar. I do not remember where it was.

I have posed the question on the PCLinuxOS Forum but so far have not had any posts after 24 hours, which is unusual but does happen a few times.

Any suggestions?

JohnS
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Joined: 18/11/2011
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 4133

Posted: 09:36pm 24 Mar 2019

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What is the question?

Seems rather vague...

John

plover

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Joined: 18/04/2013
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Posted: 12:11am 25 Mar 2019

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Why can I not use the left direction key to move back on the command line?

OpenSSL> hepp^[[D^[[D

The example above, 'help' got misspelled and I tried to use the left direction key to move two characters left. Shown I have hit the left direction key twice, so response to direction key is

[[D^

In this case it was simple enough to use the backspace but in the example following

# openssl s_client -starttls ssmtp -showcerts -connect mail.example.com:587

the mistake is in ssmtp, one s too many so here using direction keys suddenly seems very attractive. Using the backspace and retyping from memory is not working for me either.

If there was a command to clear the cmd line I can use the mouse to copy and paste from a text file (that is what I do for long lines).

The mouse can not reposition caret in the command line either.Edited by plover 2019-03-26

panky

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Joined: 02/10/2012
Location: Australia
Posts: 1116

Posted: 01:45am 25 Mar 2019

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Not familiar enough with Linux to answer properly but it would appear that once you open a session with your ISP, you are sending character by character rather than building a line and sending it complete with a CR. The ISP is grabbing your arrow keys and translating them into escape codes and echoing back to you.

Can't see an obvious solution sorry,
panky.

Edit: Actually, the following link may be helpfull.
here Edited by panky 2019-03-26

... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it!

JohnS
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Joined: 18/11/2011
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 4133

Posted: 01:06pm 26 Mar 2019

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That example:
openssl s_client -starttls ssmtp -showcerts -connect mail.example.com:587

just gives me a usage message (due to the bad arg ssmtp) and so for me it does not behave as described.

John

plover

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Joined: 18/04/2013
Location: Australia
Posts: 306

Posted: 09:22am 28 Mar 2019

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The long command line was just to demonstrate why using direction left key would have been handy to get back to the "bad argument"

[gert@KDE5-os1-plasma5 ~]$ openssl
OpenSSL> ^[[D^[[D
Invalid command'; type "help" for a list.
error in
OpenSSL>

In above I used the left direction key only twice and then

When entering the 'openssl' I am guessing another style of terminal action is invoked, guessing that the keyboard mapping is changed.

JohnS
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Joined: 18/11/2011
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 4133

Posted: 02:35pm 28 Mar 2019

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It looks like it's setting raw or the like but I don't know for sure or why.

I'm guessing - have you searched on the net and found no answer?

If not, look up the maintainer(s) and/or author(s) and ask them your question(s).

Or, read the source - unlike a lot of software it is available.

I suppose if none of those appeal you could do what you'd have to do with proprietary software and pay someone to pursue it for you - er, not me though :)

JohnEdited by JohnS 2019-03-30

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