stty defaults on various unix flavours

stty defaults on various unix flavours

The motivation for this page was curiosity and interest in historical correlations.

Find out stty defaults with

stty(1). Calling it without arguments shows the differences from the defaults.
Pay attention not to use GNU stty, which behaves different here.
"stty sane" restores most (but not all) of the settings to the default.
Sometimes you can unset a value by using "undef" or "\^-" as argument.
(note that an unprotected ^ is considered as a pipe symbol in traditional Bourne shells.)
Look into <sys/ttydefaults.h>, <sys/termios.h> and alike.

You might not notice unusual defaults if you are logged in remotely by ssh(1), but only with telnet.
sshd(8) logs you in differently and even tries to "export" your old settings. Not to mention shell profiles changing settings, in this concern.

In the following, "^X" means "<Ctrl-X>". See also an article in a.f.c, <62097@bbn.BBN.COM>, about a possible origin of the "^"-notation.

Also see an article from Christian Weisgerber providing some background about the BackSpace vs. Delete issue.

Various defaults:

OS	INTR	ERASE	SUSP	KILL	LNEXT	QUIT	EOF	cs8	istrip	parenb
Arbitrary choice:	^C	^H	^Z	^U	^V	^\	^D	+	+	-
Version 7 [3]	DEL	#	N/A	@	N/A			-		?
System III [4]	DEL	#	N/A	@	N/A			-		?
3 BSD [5]	DEL	#	N/A	@	N/A			-		?
4.3 BSD [6]		DEL						?	?	?
4.4 BSD [7]		DEL						-		+
HP-UX A.08.07-B.09.03 [2]	DEL	#	( )	@	N/A			-
HP-UX B.10.10-B.11.22 [2]	DEL	#	( )	@	( )			-		+
SINIX V5.2	DEL		N/A	^X	N/A	^\|		-		+
MUNIX 3.2 (SVR3.2)		DEL	^B	^X	N/A	^Y	^Z	-		+
FreeBSD 4.3 [1]		DEL							-
Linux 2.2.9		DEL							-
NetBSD 1.5		DEL							-
OpenBSD 2.9/3.1		DEL						?	-	+
SunOS 3.5, 4.1.4		DEL						-		+
SunOS 5.x		DEL				^\|		-		+
Unicos 9.0.2.2		DEL				^\|
EP/IX 2.2.1AA	DEL					^\|
OpenServer 5.0.6	DEL		( )							-
IRIX 4.0.5 / 5.3 / 6.5	DEL
OSF1 V4.0, V5.1
Minix 3.1.1
AIX 3.2.5
AIX 4.3.2										+

[1] FreeBSD 4 provides also an ERASE2 capability ("^H")
[2] HP-UX uses ^Z for "SWTCH"
[3] <sys/tty.h>
[4] <termio.h>
[5] <sys/tty.h>
[6] <ttychars.h>
[7] <sys/ttydefs.h>

About this table:

The header of the table contains some arbitrary common defaults, the table itself then only lists the actual differences.
"( )" means the capability is existent, but unset.
"N/A" means the capability is not available.
"+" and "-" are for the boolean settings, you can also consider +/- as a literal prefix when using stty(1).
DEL (here instead of "^?") is ASCII-0x7F, ^H is ASCII-BS (ASCII-0x08)
"?" means: still to be investigated
(I haven't tried the last four entries, but looked at the headers)

Some notes:

Historically, the defaults are related to early video terminals. Especially @ for "kill" was used before this character was introduced in mail adresses.
The noteworthy defaults on HP-UX are in accordance to the SVID3 (3. System V Interface Definition), as mentioned in termio(7). The SVID is an earlier standard, which obviously inherited from Version 7.
The defaults we are used to nowadays are from 4BSD in turn.

2005-12-04 ... 2008-12-06