Beware the quit = ^\

[Michael Somos <somos@grail.cba.csuohio.edu>]

pari-users,

     This is not specific to PARI-GP, but it may be of
interest anway. I was working away on a session and then :

...
%79 = 0
? [a0,a1,a2,a3,Quit (core dumped)
...

which left me wondering what happened to crash my session.
It turns out to be a combination of a typing error and a
UNIX 'feature'. I was attempting to type the ']' closing
square bracket. Somehow I think I overshot and hit the '\'
key (which would not be fatal) but somehow I also moved my
left finger to hit the control key. The result is Control-\
which happens to be the trigger for dumping core. This UNIX
'feature' is controlled by the 'stty' command as follows :

> stty -a|grep quit
intr = ^c; quit = ^\; erase = ^h; kill = ^u;

I never have any use for 'quit', but use 'erase' a lot and
sometimes 'intr' to stop a program. Thus it was a mystery
to me why I was dumping core until I figured this out. I
hope this has cleared up the mystery for you also. Shalom,
Michael