[Cialug] cat -A... what do those characters mean?

[Todd Walton]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 2:38 PM David Champion <dchamp1337 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wouldn't rely on the caret notation, look up the hex code as the source
> of truth. I've seen cases where the character represented in various
> notations doesn't match what the actual hex value is in the file.

Good to know. Hexdump and xxd are good for that.

I've also found "ascii":

Name        : ascii
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 3.15
Release     : 1.el7
Size        : 39 k
Repo        : installed
>From repo   : epel
Summary     : Interactive ascii name and synonym chart
URL         : http://www.catb.org/~esr/ascii/
License     : GPLv2
Description : The ascii utility provides easy conversion between
various byte representations
            : and the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (ASCII) character
            : table.  It knows about a wide variety of hex, binary,
octal, Teletype mnemonic,
            : ISO/ECMA code point, slang names, XML entity names, and
other representations.
            : Given any one on the command line, it will try to
display all others.  Called
            : with no arguments it displays a handy small ASCII chart.

With that, I can give it a literal circumflex and H, and it tells me:

todd $ ascii ^H
ASCII 0/8 is decimal 008, hex 08, octal 010, bits 00001000: called ^H, BS
Official name: Backspace
C escape: '\b'
Other names:

w00t! That will come in handy on occasion.

--
Todd