16.14 Showing Non-Printable Characters in FilenamesFrom time to time, you may get files with non-printing characters, spaces, and other garbage in them. This usually is the result of some mistake - but it's a pain nevertheless.
If you're using BSD UNIX, the
ls
command gives you some help; it
will convert all non-printing characters to a question mark (
%
This shows that there are two non-printing characters between
If you're using System V UNIX, you have a different set of problems. System V's ls doesn't convert the non-printing characters to question marks. In fact, it doesn't do anything at all - it just spits these weird characters at your terminal, which can respond in any number of strange and hostile ways. Most of the non-printing characters have special meanings - ranging from "don't take any more input" to "clear the screen." To prevent this, use the -b option. [3] This tells ls to print the octal value of any non-printing characters, preceeded by a backslash. For example, on System V:
% This shows that the non-printing characters have octal values 13 and 14, respectively. If you look up these values in an ASCII table ( 51.3 ) , you will see that they correspond to CTRL-k and CTRL-l. And - if you think about what's happening - you'll realize that CTRL-l is a formfeed character, which tells many terminals to clear the screen. That's why the regular ls command behaved so strangely. Once you know what you're dealing with, you can use a wildcard pattern to delete or rename the file. - |
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