Special characters

consty · 08-03-2005, 02:09 PM

Hi,
How can I program characters like ESCAPE, CTL- , ALT+, in a shell script.
Thans for help

schneidz · 08-03-2005, 03:28 PM

this might help:

schneidz@lq> echo 55"\012" 6
55
6
schneidz@lq> echo 55"\010" 6
5 6

"\012" is the octal for line feed. and "\010" is the octal for backspace.

good luck,

rstewart · 08-03-2005, 05:36 PM

Hi,

If you are using the vi (vim) editor, you can hit "control-v" followed by the character you want while in insert mode. "Control-v" instructs vi to take the next character literally. So for an escape you would type control-v and press the esc key, for CTL+ you would hit control-v and then press control-+, etc.

eddiebaby1023 · 08-07-2005, 05:53 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by schneidz
this might help:

schneidz@lq> echo 55"\012" 6
55
6
schneidz@lq> echo 55"\010" 6
5 6

"\012" is the octal for line feed. and "\010" is the octal for backspace.

good luck,

You'll probably need the -e flag to echo if you want these to work in modern Linux.