[BusyBox] Re: getty->ash: sticky caps lock

[Larry Doolittle]

> If I login with caps-lock off all is normal.
>                     
> If I login with caps-lock on, then all following output is caps-lock and I
> cannot turn it off anymore until I ctrl+d and re-login with caps-lock off.
>    
> All output becomes caps: PS1, scripts output, error messages:
> DDD: NO SUCH FILE OR DIRECTORY
> ...
>      
> Is there a known work-around for this?

Bwa-ha-ha!  You have been bitten by a 30-year-old backwards-compatibility
"feature".  Unix is supposed to work as correctly as possible when faced
with a terminal so old that IT HAS NO LOWERCASE CAPABILITY.

Under man getty:
       The user's name is scanned to  see  if  it  contains  only
       upper-case  characters.   If  so, the system is set to map
       any future upper-case characters into lower-case.
The getty in this case is a really old getty_ps, but yours apparently
has this same feature.  And while the man page doesn't mention it,
the conversion is two-way: incoming uppercase characters from the
terminal are converted to lowercase, and lowercase terminals about
to be sent to the terminal are converted to uppercase.  These conversions
happen inside the kernel at the tty driver level.

      - Larry