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

[Tim Wilson]

I guess the question is, is it carat H, or Control-H? When I see ^H, I
interpret that as Control-H, which is backspace.

To get a bullet, draw a + then go back (i.e. backspace) and draw an o.

Or cat the file without -A and see what it displays.

On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 2:24 PM Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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-- 
Tim
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