More often than I care to admit, I run ping when under failsafe and, at least when connected by serial, can't break out of it with control-c or control-d. When I'm physically close to the box, a power-cycle, while undesirable, seems to be the only option.
Is there a way to "cleanly" break out of programs when running under failsafe and a second connection is not available?
(Running screen on macOS, if it matters)
Well, in the case of ping, I use the -c argument. This explixitly stops ping after N tries.
For a program like top, I've only been able to CTRL+C; but there is also an N iteration argument (-n) as well.
Yes, I'm aware of those options, and already have "real" versions of ping and several other utilities in my images. Unfortunately, after so many years, ping <some-target> is habit and gets occasionally typed, especially when connecting over serial and trying to establish other network connectivity.