topic Special characaters in Operating System - HP-UX

Special characaters

Jerome Salyers — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:05:35 GMT

i'm working with some software and i want to be able to manipulate the output of the top command a bit...

however, there are those pesky ^[[5C type characters that clog up the output... i can't find out what they are or, more importantly, how i can use a regex to manipulate the text they are attached to...

using my meager s/ / /g skills i can get rid of all of it but not the first ^[

any ideas?

thanks in advance

jerome

Re: Special characaters

Andreas Voss — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:27:53 GMT

Hi,

try this:

sed 's/[[:cntrl:]]\[//g'

Regards

Re: Special characaters

Steven Sim Kok Leong — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:35:20 GMT

Hi,

You can also use strings to filter off non-text chracters including the ctrl chracters ie.

# top -d 1 | strings

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com

Re: Special characaters

Robin Wakefield — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:42:02 GMT

Hi Jerome,

Not sure if you realise, but there's a hidden (not in my man pages anyway) -f switch to allow you to dump the output to a file.

Rgds, Robin.

Re: Special characaters

Madhu Sudhan_1 — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:56:18 GMT

Guess you are using vi to search and replace the special characters. If so the trick to look for special characters in vi is s/Cntrl+v+m//g. To replace ^M with nothing.
The same search will fail if you use ^M (which is caret/circumflex/(Shift + 6).
Cntrl+v remains the same and the other charachters keep changing based on your search requirements.

Hope this helps.
-Madhu

Re: Special characaters

Madhu Sudhan_1 — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 10:58:50 GMT

Take a look at my thread regarding -f option with top.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x5ee3f841489fd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

-Madhu