(MIT, opposite of line feed) 1. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print "X squared", you just output "X", line starve, "2", line feed." (The line starve causes the "2" to appear on the line above the "X", and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 26, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlike "line feed", "line starve" is *not* standard ASCII terminology. Even among hackers it is considered silly. 3. (Proposed) A sequence such as c (used in System V echo, as well as nroff and troff) that suppresses a newline or other character(s) that would normally be emitted. [Jargon File] (1995-02-03)

A line starve describes the feeding of paper in a line printer back one line or moving the cursor on a character terminal up one line. It is the opposite of a line feed.

In geometry, the notion of line or straight line was introduced by ancient mathematicians to represent straight objects (i.e.