what is the command or keys I can enter in vi

[Hanry Zhou]

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

thanks,

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Hanry,

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

-Sri

[Hanry Zhou]

no, cat -v file doesn't work.


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

[Geoff Wild · Accepted solution]

From vi:

:set list


Rgds...Geoff

[Rodney Hills]

cat -vt filename

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

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

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

[Bill Hassell]

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.

[Andrew Merritt_2]

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