cat safely without messed up terminal

curos · 08-19-2006, 08:59 AM

Maybe I'm making this up, but was there a way to run the command 'cat' safely wihtout accidentally messing up the terminal with garbage characters? I know you can just run 'reset', but was wondering if there was a way to run cat safely.

Bruce Hill · 08-19-2006, 09:07 AM

I don't understand what you mean by "cat safely" or "garbage characters",
unless you were trying to cat a binary file or something.

Code:

bash-3.1$ cat useful-commands 
ldd `which fluxbox`|awk '{print $1}' > fluxlibs
grep -lf fluxlibs /var/log/packages/*

Flux (mine, at least) is linked against libs from following packages:
Code:

/var/log/packages/cxxlibs-6.0.3-i486-1 /var/log/packages/elflibs-9.1.0-i486-2 /var/log/packages/expat-1.95.7-i486-1 
/var/log/packages/gcc-3.3.4-i486-1 /var/log/packages/gcc-g++-3.3.4-i486-1 /var/log/packages/x11-6.8.1-i486-3 
/var/log/packages/zlib-1.2.2-i486-2

posted by Tinkster in LQ

Could you post an example?

michaelk · 08-19-2006, 09:11 AM

The terminal can only display printable ASCII characters i.e a-z, 0-9 etc. The garbage is cause by non-printable ASCII characters in the data. Save the data to a file and view it with a hex editor like hexedit. I'm sure there are other methods but this is what I use.

What are you trying to do?

Alien Bob · 08-19-2006, 01:22 PM

You probably mean

Code:

cat -v

Eric

curos · 08-19-2006, 05:03 PM

Thanks Alien Bob, that's what I was looking for. The reason being that I wanted to set an alias for cat so that my terminal doesn't get messed up. Just wondering now if this has any bad side effects...

And to clarify, yes, I did mean using cat on binary files. It messes up the terminal in such a way that all normal ascii characters are displayed by weird nonintelligible symbols.

tronayne · 08-20-2006, 01:42 PM

In addition to "cat -v" you can use the "strings" utility to safely display an object file's content (useful if you're looking for a pattern in a file).

gnashley · 08-20-2006, 02:54 PM

I used to get that until I made a habit of using 'less' or 'more' instead of 'cat' -unless you are prowling around in /proc, in which case 'cat' is better.