line starve

(MIT, opposite of line feed) 1. To feed paper through a

printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do

this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the

previous line of the screen. "To print "X squared", you just

output "X", line starve, "2", line feed." (The line starve

causes the "2" to appear on the line above the "X", and the

line feed gets back to the original line.)

2. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal

to perform this action. ASCII 26, also called SUB or

control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days

before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard.

Unlike "line feed", "line starve" is *not* standard ASCII

terminology. Even among hackers it is considered silly.

3. (Proposed) A sequence such as c (used in System V

echo, as well as nroff and troff) that suppresses a

newline or other character(s) that would normally be

emitted.

[Jargon File]

(1995-02-03)