telneting backspace key is wrong

Question

When I telnet into our works sun station my backspace key doesn't work. I use a temporary workaround of:

$ stty erase ^H

This works but each time I telnet in I have to retype this. How can I set this to work properly in my .cshrc file?

Answer 1

You can put stty erase ^H in your .cshrc file. This will fix the problem.

Answer 2

actually, I've run into multiple levels of this before. X windows sometimes maps DEL to Backspace and vice versa. Sometimes logging into one machine through another machine also does this.

Here's a comprehensive look at how to solve this: http://www.ibb.net/~anne/keyboard.html

Answer 3

When loging into a Solaris system ^H would be the default erase key. I assume your friendly administrator changed it to ^? somewhere in the profile files for your shell (have a look with stty -a). A possible reason would be to make Solaris behave more like other systems at this site. Therefore you may want to consider to change the behaviour of your telnet client (send ^? instead of ^H).

On a side note - telnet sends all information in the clear, including your username and password. SSH encrypts all communications, does everything telnet does and more. It is commonplace now, even on fairly recent versions of Solaris.