Terminal: stuck in a ">" line

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I've searched the web for an answer to this and all I get is manuals on how to use "VIM." I don't have that nor do I want it. Anyways, when I'm in Terminal typing commands, every now and then I may type something wrong and I'll be put on the next line down preceded by a ">" and am unable to get out of lines starting with ">" even if I hit enter. For a visual example:

Last login: Sun Jun 30 18:22:37 on _______
___________:~ _____$ command command command blah blah
> type something and hit enter
> oh look another line why can't I exit this
> exit
> logout
> oh that didn't work
> etc.


Anywho, I can exit this annoying ">" line by closing the Terminal window, but of course that terminates the running process and makes me retype everything I went through to return to that point. Perhaps there's a hotkey combination I'm unaware of that can exit the ">" lines. Thanks for reading!

-Bmeister
 
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DISREGARD MESSAGE ABOVE: ANSWER FOUND

Turns out skimming through other forums on mac-forums led me to a list of shortcuts, which (after trying them all) ONE did the trick!!! Ctrl-d is what I was looking for. Cheers!
 
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Just so you know:
CtrlC tells the terminal to send a SIGINT to the current foreground process, which by default translates into terminating the application. CtrlD tells the terminal that it should register a EOF on standard input, which bash interprets as a desire to exit.
Depending on whats happening one or the other should work.
 

Raz0rEdge

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Bash will give you that symbol if you enter a command that needs multiple arguments to succeed..on the other hand, if you put in the argument that causes the command to kick off, then you won't need to hit CTRL-d to break out of it..

For example, if you do
Code:
$ while [ 1 ];
> do
> echo "Hello"
> sleep 1
> done
Hello
Hello
Hello
...

The 'done' here is the final keyword/argument to the 'while' command to get started, so I immediately start seeing my Hello message showing up one every second.

When you use the history (up arrow) to see what command BASH executed, you see
Code:
while [ 1 ]; do echo "Hello"; sleep 1; done

On the other hand, a common use of this BASH tactic is to create a new file with something like
Code:
$ cat > file.txt << EOF
> This is line one
> and line two
> and so on
> EOF

The result of this is:
Code:
$ cat file.txt
This is line one
and line two
and so on
 

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