Why does pressing Ctrl+Shift-6 interrupt a command or IOS?

[solc]

Hello, I would like to hear your opinion.

I'm just learnig about Cisco switches and routers, and IOS (Internetwork Operating System) commands.

There I learned that "to abort DNS lookups, traceroutes, pings, or to interrupt an IOS process, use Ctrl-Shift-6".

Why did Cisco assign Ctrl-Shift-6 to abort and interrupt?

I think Ctrl-Shift-6 sends a control code [30], which is "Record Separator" in ASCII.

Please give me a convincing reason. (To remember the keyboard shortcut)

[Seb Rupik · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

It is not that Ctrl-Shift-6 has been decided on by Cisco, rather the particular terminal emulator you are using has that as the shortcut for sending the 'break' terminal escape character. For instance minicom under linux uses Ctrl-X F for the same function.

cheers,

Seb.

[solc]

I understand.

On certain terminals, you use Ctrl+^ (on US keyboards, you can type ^ with Shift + 6) to send a character with character code 30. I thought that the character codes 0-27 are assigned to other keyboard shortcuts, so I thought that the extra character code 30 was used.

Thank you very much.