There are a lot of characters that usually are not printed if you use a normal text editor, but you can easily check if they are present with your terminal and the command cat. As first thing let's create a simple text file with these special characters, open a terminal and run the command. 25.7 Show Non-Printing Characters with cat -v or od -c Especially if you use an ASCII-based terminal, files can have characters that your terminal can't display.
Some characters will lock up your communications software or hardware, make your screen look strange, or cause other weird problems. 5 cat has a -v option which converts non-printing characters to their caret notation (which is useful if we don't want the terminal to interpret the control characters literally in cat output). But as I understand, the caret notation only applies to non.
A full list of all non-printable characters along with their decimal and hexidecimal codes are shown below. How to find non-printable characters in a file # If you need to see all nonprintable characters in a document, you can use cat -v filename.txt in terminal to find them, where filename.txt is the file you want to show. 2 is there any linux command line tool to cat any file's content which may be mixed with UTF-8 string and non-printable chars, but also show non-printable chars as \xNN? such as abc\xa1defg, PS: I don't need the two column output like xxd produces, or the the space separated output that od produces.
So far, the most close result is: od. To display non-printable characters with cat command we have the following options: -A, -v, -E. Learn Bash - Show non printable charactersThis is useful to see if there are any non-printable characters, or non-ASCII characters.
e.g. If you have copy-pasted the code from web, you may have quotes like " instead of standard ". $ cat -v file.txt $ cat -vE file.txt # Useful in detecting trailing spaces.
e.g. $ echo '" ' cat -vE # echo will be replaced by actual file. M-bM-^@M-^] $ You.
Seeing Non-Printable Characters If you want to inspect a file to see if there are any non-printable characters present, you can use cat -A (which shows all characters). cat -v: yes exactly, -v makes cat show you all the non-printable characters by escaping them. It is definitely garbled.
This garble is what your terminal normally sees and interprets into color/formatting before displaying it to you.