sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes: Then why do you have your backspace generating that code? Note that the problem is that most shell support ^H as erase regardless of the stty setting and thus hide the problem. Try something less intelligent that takes tty input and you'll see that ^h doesn't work there too. You can. Just set tty-erase-char explicitly. However you really don't want to do that. What you really want is to make your backspace key generate DEL instead. For instance in xterms you do this XTerm*vt100.translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f) \n\ <Key>Delete: string(0x1b) string([3~) Every terminal emulator worthy of the name has a similar option. Jan