Hm... Rubout is ASCII 0177 (or 0377 I guess). On an old (early 1970s) Teletype ASR-33, you could type and make punched tape, off-line. If you made a mistake, you can't fill the recently punched holes in the paper tape, but instead you could back up the tape puncher and punch a whole row of holes (hence RUBOUT) over the erroneously typed character. The convention was that such characters would be ignored upon reading. In more modern (or less stone-age) times, the rubout key I guess was used as an interrupt character (when typing on-line).
So, a shorter answer to your question is hinted at in the "save" entry below: RUBOUT means the interrrupt character, usually Control-C. Unix is really old. --Paul Vojta On Fri, Oct 02, 2015 at 08:34:17PM -0700, Michael Convey wrote: > On the mailx man page, under "Examples" and "Getting Started" is the > following: > > "If, while you are composing the message you decide that you do not wish > to send it after all, you can abort the letter with a RUBOUT. Typing a > single RUBOUT causes mailx to print `(Interrupt -- one more to kill > letter)'. Typing a second RUBOUT causes mailx to save your partial > letter on the file `dead.letter' in your home directory and abort the > letter." > > Also, under "Binary Options", is the following: > > "*save *When the user aborts a message with two RUBOUT (interrupt > characters) mailx copies the partial letter to the file 'dead.letter' in > the home directory. This option is set by default." > > Forgive my ignorance, but I cannot get this RUBOUT feature to work? I > Googled this and sources suggest the "Delete" key, but that doesn't work. I > also tried the "Backspace" key without success. > > Thanks in advance for your help. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > nail-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nail-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ nail-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nail-devel
