If the sending process blocks after filling the pipe (on Linux, 512 bytes), hitting ctrl-C should be effective—any of these terminals should be able to sink tha

If the sending process blocks after filling the pipe (on Linux, 512 bytes), hitting ctrl-C should be effective—any of these terminals should be able to sink that in negligible time. If it instead takes a long time, there are probably large buffers between: * If you're talking about ssh to a faraway machine, the TCP layer is probably responsible. (I'm not even sure if there's anything you can do about this; the buffer (aka "window size" in TCP terminology, plus the send and receive buffers on their respective ends) is meant to be at least the bandwidth-delay product, and as far as I know, the OS doesn't provide an interface to tell it you don't need a lot of bandwidth for this connection. It'd be nice if you could limit the TCP connection's bandwidth to what the terminal could sink.) * If you're talking about something running on the machine itself, it's probably an over-large buffer inside the terminal program itself.