>I admit, I have torched my term state with binary output, I just
>never made the leap to preventing it by changing the behavior of
>grep. Reductio ad absurdium: You know, I have wedged my term state
>more frequently with cat than with grep maybe if we...

i've done this too and gotten quite frustrated with it.  resulting in:

to get *to* the annoying alternate character set...

   echo "" | tr '\012' '\016'   (or echo ^V^N)

and to return to normalcy...

   echo "" | tr '\012' '\017'   (or echo ^V^O)

and to break clear[1] on an xterm (at least)...

   echo "" | tr '\012' '\226'

and to fix it again...

   echo "" | tr '\012' '\227'

[1] by break, i mean that clear no longer works.  this *seems* to me
to mean that the xterm has been "told" no longer to track (spa or
start protected area?) what characters are where on the screen and so
clear cannot clear them.  the problem is that when clearing is
reenabled (epa or end protected area?), the characters you want to
clear are still "untracked" so you have to hit a screenful of returns
(or start and exit emacs :) to get the entire screen to be tracked
again.

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