line starve

[MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve, `2', line feed." (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Today, the term might be used for the ISO reverse line feed character 0x8D. Unlike `line feed', `line starve' is not standard ASCII terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well as nroff and troff) that suppresses a newline or other character(s) that would normally be emitted.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, this entry manually entered by rootbeer277.