Fixing the display with reset

Sometime your terminal gets messed up. It will be full of weird character sequences that can lock down your display. These characters will hide what you type or character displayed into strange symbols.

Messed up bash terminal session

To fix your display type the reset command or tput command as follows:

reset

OR

tput reset

Or reset an AT&T 5620 terminal, overriding the type of terminal in the environmental variable TERM:

tput -T5620 reset