Is there a way to get out of a "hung" state in IRB?

Question

When using irb or rails console, I sometimes get stuck. For example, I forget a closing quote, so when I press enter, it's still waiting on that.

Sometimes I can get out of this (by suppyling the closing quote, for example), but sometimes I can't. If not, I usually do the following:

# Suspend the irb or console process
(Control + Z)

# Kill the last suspended process
kill -9 %

This is annoying and disrupts whatever I was doing in the console. What I'd like is an equivalent to Control + C on the command line, to say "forget that - give me a new prompt", so I can continue working in the console.

Is there a way to do this?

Hereford

Control + C normally does the trick for me i must admit. – Miraculous

@zoltarSpeaks - doesn't that kick you out of the console? – Hereford

@Nathan nope. Control + D does (when entered enough times). It quits you also from terminal session, ssh session, su and all other types of sessions. – Linkage

Answer 1

Press Control + D once or twice. That should do it.

Airline

D for Dogbert? :) That seems to work. Do you know what it's actually doing? – Hereford

:D. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-file Control+D sends an EOF character to the stream. – Airline

Interesting. So I guess this fits with the "everything in Unix is a file" philosophy - my current terminal input included. – Hereford

Interesting, I always thought that ctrl + D stood for disconnect. – Marrufo

Answer 2

when you get recursion or Ctrl+D doesn't work

you can kill current process ($$)

exec("kill -9 #{$$}")

Harpy