Putty screen freeze due to CTRL-S

Over the last couple of day, I faced a problem of getting screen freezes while I was working on vi. It became very frustrating as I had to restart my putty and also remove the swap file.

I finally realised that the reason was I was pressing CTLR-S for saving a file out of sheer habit. CTLR-S on bash generally means XOFF (output off) and you need to do a CTLR-Q to turn it back on.

Instead of that a simple addition to .bash_profile can save you the trouble.

stty -ixon

However even with this I was getting a statment such as i-search when I would type CTLR-S.

For that I removed the binding from my bash shell. 

bind -r '\C-s'

So all in all the changes need in your .bash_profile is

bind -r '\C-s'

stty -ixon