Re: Bug in the login (tty) in Gnu-Shell Utils 2.0

[Bob Proulx]

> When the login screen appears after booting if I press the right
> arrow on my keyboard, which places [C in the username space then
> press enter to type in the password, the case of the letters changes
> to uppercase.

This is probably the way it is supposed to work.  The login program
tries to detect if you have typed in your user id with capital
letters.  Many older terminals do not have both upper and lower case
letters and have only upper case letters.  I know this is hard to
believe today but it is true.  Therefore when login determines that
the user id was typed in with capital letters it sets the 'iuclc' and
'olcuc' terminal I/O modes which would map all input to lower case and
all output to upper case.  Read the documentation or the 'stty'
command for more information.

The program is likely mistaking that the right arrow escape sequence,
ESC-[-C, is an upper case character.  Therefore believing that you are
on an upper case only terminal it is setting things up to work there.
Several newer systems have stopped supporting upper case only
terminals and no longer do that.  I suppose that is okay.  You have to
let go of the old stuff sometime.

If you get into this mode you can usually get out of the mode by
setting the following on the command line.  But most people just found
it easier to log out and back in again as you did.

  stty -iuclc -olcuc

> This affects the password prompt and everything else I type even if
> I then make a successful login later.  The only way to return to
> normal appears to require me to login successfully then log out
> again.  I have only found this with this version of GNU/Linux, a Red
> Hat distribution that I have used before does not appear to posses
> this behavior.  I do hope this small report is useful for you.

/bin/login is not part of GNU Shell Utils.  Is Slackware rpm based?
If so then check what package /bin/login is in with 'rpm -qf
/bin/login' which might be util-linux.  Then get information about
that package with 'rpm -qi util-linux'.  But this is not caused by any
program in sh-utils.

Bob