No, thats what ctrl-s and ctrl-q are for.

Here's the rest in one place:

                       eof          VEOF         EOF character
                       eol          VEOL         EOL character
                       eol2         VEOL2        EOL2 character
                       erase        VERASE       ERASE character
                       erase2       VERASE2      ERASE2 character
                       werase       VWERASE      WERASE character
                       intr         VINTR        INTR character
                       kill         VKILL        KILL character
                       quit         VQUIT        QUIT character
                       susp         VSUSP        SUSP character
                       start        VSTART       START character
                       stop         VSTOP        STOP character
                       dsusp        VDSUSP       DSUSP character
                       lnext        VLNEXT       LNEXT character
                       reprint      VREPRINT     REPRINT character
                       status       VSTATUS      STATUS character

cchars: discard = ^O; dsusp = ^Y; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>; eol2 = <undef>; erase = ^?; intr = ^C; kill = ^U; lnext = ^V; min = 1; quit = ^\; reprint = ^R; start = ^Q; status = ^T; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; time = 0; werase = ^W;

Back in the day, using a slow modem or teletype, discard (flush output) was super important, but several years back when I hooked up an actual Wyse dumb terminal to a Linux box I was dismayed to discover that it's actually not implemented in Linux.

Nice. Reminds me of using the "stty -a" and "stty <some_param>" commands many times on Unix terminals, back in the day, for some of those settings you list, also for things like CR/LF translation (ocrnl, onlcr, ...), raw, sane, ...

I don't think so, since cat is reading from massivefile, not from your tty.

Also, a side note, I would rather just run "head massivefile" or even better "less massivefile" (because, most probably I'd want to see past what head shows by default). Running cat and then piping it to another program is inefficient, 2 forks + pipe.

But you miss out on this award if you don't use cat :p http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

And on systems where head was not present (seen some earlier), but sed was, you could do:

sed nq file

where n is some positive integer, to print the first n lines of the file.

Also, body (the complement of head and tail :)

# body

sed -n $1,$2p $3