From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: steffen@sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 22:22:27 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20171017202227.GE_gC%steffen@sdaoden.eu> Tony Finch wrote: |Dan Cross wrote: |> This is an aside, but I must admit -- with a sense of mild shame -- |> that the '-v' option to cat is one that I use with some regularity. | |4.4BSD has the vis(1) and unvis(1) utilities which are more principled |implementations of this feature (with corresponding section 3 functions). |It's slightly annoying being on Linux without vis and having to resort to |`cat -v` like some kind of savage. Stop! The inner circle of Unix/POSIX standard developers have (again) shown great wisdom and have put it down black on white: Historical versions of the cat utility include the *e, *t, and *v, options which permit the ends of lines, characters, and invisible characters, respectively, to be rendered visible in the output. The standard developers omitted these options because they provide too fine a degree of control over what is made visible, and similar output can be obtained using a command such as: sed *n l pathname The latter also has the advantage that its output is unambiguous, whereas the output of historical cat *etv is not. But mind you, in preparation of this email i found a bug in Busybox sed(1) which simply echoes nothing for the above. --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)