Now this is something I had never heard of until I Stumbled Upon it. Ever wonder what one can do with the mysterious SysRq key on your keyboard? (I just noticed my Logitech S510 keyboard doesn’t have it marked but it’s usually the Print Screen key)

Well, for you Linux users, it can actually be a bit of a life saver. If your system is frozen and you can’t kill the X server with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace or you aren’t able to jump to another terminal using the Function keys, most people will just go and hit the power or reset button and reboot, risking damage to the system. I know I would…

Well, next time, press and hold Alt+SysRq and enter REISUB (Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring).

This will send the term signal to all the processes (except for init), then the kill signal to all process (again except for init), mounts the filesystem as readonly to prevent triggering fsck, and finally reboots.

There’s actually a lot more you can do with the SysRq key combination, all of which you can find on Wikipedia.

I also came across this post which talks about how to disable the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination while trying to find out what it did