command prompt stuck on same line

Question

Sometimes (rarely) it happens that when I hit enter on a terminal, the command prompt doesn't go to the next line, but it gets printed again on the same line.

My work around is to simply close the terminal and open a new one. Is there any way to avoid this?

Steps to reproduce:

1. try to log into mongo with authentication enabled, so that you get the prompt to enter the password, like so: mongo --authenticationDatabase somedb -u someuser -p,
2. then in the password prompt that is shown, hit ctrl+c, voila, now everything is on same line

Answer 1

Use the reset command.

See man reset:

When invoked as reset, tset sets cooked and echo modes, turns off cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline translation and resets any unset special characters to their default values before doing the terminal initialization described above. This is useful after a program dies leaving a terminal in an abnormal state.

It's useful for lots of situations where the terminal is acting up, like if a script has turned off local echo and died before turning it back on so you can't see what you're typing at the prompt...

Answer 2

The next time you have the issue type ctrl+c and it will end the command typed. This may help, let me know what happens.

You also want to make sure what you are typing is being input correctly; that may be why it is catching.