The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.unix.shell as well.
Regarding how to defuse $ sleep 666; echo BOOM given only one terminal, m> Here, running bash in a xterm, this works for me: m> ^S ^C ^C ^Q For me in xterm, or even on the Debian sid tty1 console with no dotfiles to be read at login, just ^S ^C already gives $ sleep 666; echo BOOM ^C BOOM BM> In most shells you can press C-z. Won't help with bash, which is what I'm talking about here, $ sleep 666; echo BOOM ^Z [1]+ Stopped sleep 666 BOOM No, the only way to defuse it I find is to: hit ^S, then wait for more than 666 seconds, then hit ^C. And even supposing one could just open another window to kill the shell (just to diffuse this one line!), in a pinch everybody would probably only just remember ^C. Boom. bash --posix didn't help.
