topic Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi in Operating System - HP-UX

what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Hanry Zhou — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:18:11 GMT

to show me some weired characters within a plain UNIX file.

thanks,

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:19:07 GMT

Hi Hanry,

One way is to run 'cat -v ' to see those characters.

-Sri

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Hanry Zhou — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:22:09 GMT

no, cat -v file doesn't work.

I want to see all characters, like "tab", "space", ...

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Geoff Wild — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:25:52 GMT

From vi:

:set list

Rgds...Geoff

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Rodney Hills — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:41:52 GMT

cat -vt filename

Including "t" option will dispay tabs, formfeeds, etc as printable text.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Sridhar Bhaskarla — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:44:19 GMT

tab and space are not weird characters. Use Geoff's suggestion if you want to see tabs.

One another way is, take a copy of the file. Run 'vi' on it and in side vi do

:%s/[]//g
:%s/[]//g

-Sri

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Bill Hassell — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 20:00:07 GMT

Or the mainframe style:

xd -xc some_file

This will show every character from NUL to DEL and the hex code for each character. Change -xc to -oc to octal words for each character pair.

Re: what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

Andrew Merritt_2 — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:45:42 GMT

I'm not quite sure what is you are asking, so please explain if you're not getting the answers you want.

One option that may do what you want is to use 'vis' and 'inv'. E.g.

vis file >/tmp/tmpfile
vi /tmp/tmpfile
inv /tmp/tmpfile >file

If you want to see spaces and tabs as '\s' and '\t', use the '-t' option to 'vis'.

Andrew