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I was doing a MySQL dump over SSH using Putty, and now it is just typing PuTTY over and over again into the console, Ctrl+C doesn't do anything.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

PuTTYPuTTYPuTTY

peterh
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Adam
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    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12876699/putty-likes-to-print-itself-sometimes-in-my-command-line – Dusan Bajic Oct 14 '14 at 10:10
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    Putty is such a narcissist ! It would have been much more lovely if it had printed AugustinAugustinAugustinAugustinAugustinAugustinAugustinAugustinAugustinAgustin... – augustin Oct 14 '14 at 14:01
  • Does this behaviour happen often? is it reproductible? if so, what is the minimal sequence leading to this? – Manu H Oct 14 '14 at 14:12
  • It happens after dumping a database, it happens every time, but only after it's finished which is odd. – Adam Oct 15 '14 at 08:23

1 Answers1

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Yes. Your mysql dump is not clear text, but contains terminal controlling characters as well. Practically, it contains binary data. You can experience the similar flash if you print any binary data into your screen, f.e. cat /bin/bash.

It shouldn't happen so. Some solutions:

  1. Check, where is the binary data in your mysql dump (I think, you had probably textual data with some non-ascii encoding).
  2. Convert your output encoding to UTF-7 (yes, UTF-7, not UTF-8!). The UTF-7 encoding is unicode too, but instead of the non-ascii bytes, it uses ascii-compatible sequences. It will only work if your mysql dump contains only valid utf8. It can be done by piping it to an iconv converter command: mysqldump ...|iconv -f your-actual-encoding-which-is-probably-utf-8 -t utf-7.
  3. Check the dump with a viewer capable to handle such problems. For example, vim is very good in binary data editing. If your problem was caused by big blobs, hexedit can be also useful.
peterh
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