The fact that the kernel TTY driver is responsible for handling erase in cooked mode leads to a wrinkle: in order to do that correctly it needs to know if you'r

The fact that the kernel TTY driver is responsible for handling erase in cooked mode leads to a wrinkle: in order to do that correctly it needs to know if you're using a multibyte character set, and if so, which one (because a single erase must erase an entire multibyte codepoint). Linux uses the (non-POSIX) IUTF8 termios(2) flag to indicate a terminal is using UTF8. If this is set on a terminal which isn't UTF-8, you'll see some odd results - for example, in a terminal using the single byte character set ISO-8859-1 but with IUTF8 set and in cooked mode, if you type: áá and then backspace once and hit enter, the process reading cooked mode will recieve "á\n" - the erase has eaten two ISO-8859-1 codepoints because it thought that they were a single UTF-8 codepoint. I've never used a non-UTF-8 multibyte terminal (like BIG5 or SHIFT-JIS) but I don't think erase would work correctly in cooked mode on such terminals.