ascii characters
 

i have redhat 8.0 installed in my system
when i give at the shell
$man cat > we.txt
it works ,the help for cat is available in
we.txt . When i type
$cat we.txt - it displays corrrectly ,but when
i open the file in vi or vim it displays the contents along with some acsii characters like
^H^H^H^H^H^H .plz help me .....

The ^H character for instance is ctrl and h and means backspace. Another example is ^M which is a carriage return or enter key - a new line !!!. You see ^M a lot when you open a windows .txt file in linux.

Try it out type a line onto the prompt and press ctrl and h together and it should delete the last character you type. or ctrl and m will return the line you are on.

The only thing that confuses me is why you are wanting the man page in ascii file???