How to guard against bugs like this one?

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Feb 1, 6:34 pm, kj <no.em... at please.post> wrote:
>
> An innocuous little script, let's call it buggy.py, only 10 lines
> long, and whose output should have been, at most two lines, was
> quickly dumping tens of megabytes of non-printable characters to
> my screen (aka gobbledygook), and in the process was messing up my
> terminal *royally*.
>

In linux terminals, try running the command "reset" to clear up any
gobbledy-gook. It also works if you happen to hit CTRL-C while
entering a password, in the rare case that it fails to set the text
back to visible mode.