tty in weird character mode

[David Csercsics]

>The tty problem reminded me that I wanted to ask this. I don't know how to
>explain this technically, but it usually happens when you've accidentally
>put a file through "more' that wasn't really text but didn't give you a
>complaint from more, or if you accidentally use less when you should have
>used zless. Can't think of other incidents where it happens though there
>probably are others. Anyway, even though you can quit the program, what
>appears on your console from then on, whether typing or reading, is not
>intelligible; i don't know if it's converting to binary or another
>character set--I would think maybe binary. Neither logging out (you can
>do it but your loggin prompt and command prompt after you've logged in
>come out in the same characters) or killing
>the tty does any good and while I can use the rest of my system fine, if I
>really want that tty back I eventually have to succumb and reboot. Is there
>a way around this? I hope I've explained it well enough for somebody to
>know what I'm talking about. I suppose I could make it happen and paste
>some of the result here but I'd rather not do it.
>Thanks.

Well have you tried just typing reset at your prompt. That will cause
the shell to reset your terminal so that it works correctly.