Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Deleting Characters (a.k.a. Backspacing) through SSH in PuTTY

I've been annoyed consistently by a quirk with SSH, PuTTY, Unix and sudo where pressing the backspace character prints a ^? on the terminal instead of deleting the previous character. Then, to my amazement today, I stumbled upon a way to delete characters through SSH in PuTTY without messing with any terminal configurations!

To delete characters, all one has to do is press either...
  • Shift+Backspace; or
  • Right Arrow
I assume this works with Terminal in Mac OS X or Linux as well, but I have not yet tried. Gone are the days now when I have to retype a 80+ character command just because of a single, silly typo...