> The tty driver will buffer lots of data (or worse, the chain of ssh connections will do it).
That's what Ctrl-O is for, right?
I used to use that all the time on my 1200 bps modem. Usually followed by a Ctrl-L to repaint since discarding some of the buffered data can leave the screen in a weird state.
Indeed. Back when 300 and 1200 bps connections were a thing, Ctrl-O (flush) was a vital special character. You can actually see "flush = ^O" if you run "stty -a" on Linux. However it's not part of Posix, and AFAIK has never been implemented on Linux. This sucks if you've gone through the trouble of hooking up a fun retro terminal or teletype to your machine.
That's what Ctrl-O is for, right?
I used to use that all the time on my 1200 bps modem. Usually followed by a Ctrl-L to repaint since discarding some of the buffered data can leave the screen in a weird state.