What does Ctrl-| (pipe key) do in a terminal?

Question

For example, when I press Ctrl+Shift+\ (a. k. a. Ctrl+|) in a IPython session I get a Quit (core dumped) message. Where is this keybinding bound and how can I deactivate it?

Answer 1

It sends SIGQUIT to an application which does produce core dump. It is the same as if you typed kill -3 PID where PID is you program process id.

For more info, read https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Termination-Signals.html

Answer 2

Don't know what "system level" means, since it's vague.

This is the old-fashioned terminal (tty) interface. You can control how key sequences are processed, at the terminal-driver level. See stty. For instance,

stty quit ''

should disable the default translation of ctrl-pipe into a QUIT.

Ultimately, doing this at the shell command-line may not help you, since some interactive apps impose their own stty settings, thus overriding/undoing what you already set at the command-line.