hi all, i have centos 5 w/o gui. i can only have access via ssh.
i have a text file that contains special (unprintable) characters, what editor i can use to exam what those character are???
i use vi, but i don't know what is ^@
may be an editor that can show ASCII as dec or hex.
thanks
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 05:56:36AM -0700, Hiep Nguyen wrote:
hi all, i have centos 5 w/o gui. i can only have access via ssh.
i have a text file that contains special (unprintable) characters, what editor i can use to exam what those character are???
i use vi, but i don't know what is ^@
^@ is the nul byte (zero byte).
may be an editor that can show ASCII as dec or hex.
xxd, included with vi, can show you the hex dump followed by the ascii one, while hexedit allows you to edit the file either entering the hexadecimal value or the ascii one.
Anyway, a text file with \000 is very unusual, maybe it got corrupted?
yes, corruption indeed, but i want to study why the program writes ^@ to this file.
t. hiep
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 05:56:36AM -0700, Hiep Nguyen wrote:
hi all, i have centos 5 w/o gui. i can only have access via ssh.
i have a text file that contains special (unprintable) characters, what editor i can use to exam what those character are???
i use vi, but i don't know what is ^@
^@ is the nul byte (zero byte).
may be an editor that can show ASCII as dec or hex.
xxd, included with vi, can show you the hex dump followed by the ascii one, while hexedit allows you to edit the file either entering the hexadecimal value or the ascii one.
Anyway, a text file with \000 is very unusual, maybe it got corrupted?
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 06:13:40AM -0700, Hiep Nguyen wrote:
yes, corruption indeed, but i want to study why the program writes ^@ to this file.
It's mostly likely not an ASCII file; it's probably UTF16 or similar so there are two bytes for every character, but the high byte is 0x00 which shows as ^@.
If this is true then tr -d '\000' < badfile > goodfile will most likely fix it.
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Stephen Harris wrote:
It's mostly likely not an ASCII file; it's probably UTF16 or similar so there are two bytes for every character, but the high byte is 0x00 which shows as ^@.
I've seen strange characters in DOS files before.
What about running dos2unix on it?
# dos2unix file.txt
Or am I thinking something else? Just a thought.
Regards, Max
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 09:54:45AM -0400, Max Hetrick wrote:
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Stephen Harris wrote:
It's mostly likely not an ASCII file; it's probably UTF16 or similar so there are two bytes for every character, but the high byte is 0x00 which shows as ^@.
I've seen strange characters in DOS files before.
DOS files typically have ^M characters at the end of each line and maybe a ^Z at the end of file. This is different to using an alternate character set.
What about running dos2unix on it?
The manual (at least on 4.5) doesn't specifically say it'll convert character sets. It might drop the \000 characters as it goes. *shrug*
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Stephen Harris wrote:
DOS files typically have ^M characters at the end of each line and maybe a ^Z at the end of file. This is different to using an alternate character set.
That's right. I couldn't remember what it was, it's been awhile since I've seen it.
Well, ignore me then, sorry for the noise. :)
Regards, Max
On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Max Hetrick wrote:
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Stephen Harris wrote:
It's mostly likely not an ASCII file; it's probably UTF16 or similar so there are two bytes for every character, but the high byte is 0x00 which shows as ^@.
I've seen strange characters in DOS files before.
What about running dos2unix on it?
# dos2unix file.txt
Or am I thinking something else? Just a thought.
Regards, Max -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
definitely not unix file, it's novell/windows thing.
On 17/04/2008, Hiep Nguyen hiep@ee.ucr.edu wrote:
i have a text file that contains special (unprintable) characters, what editor i can use to exam what those character are??? i use vi, but i don't know what is ^@ may be an editor that can show ASCII as dec or hex.
How about keeping things simple to start with. Just examine a copy of the file:
hexdump -C file.txt | less
before attempting to edit/convert/correct it.
Also, how about telling us which process is writing this file (possibly corruptly)?
Alan.
Hiep Nguyen wrote:
hi all, i have centos 5 w/o gui. i can only have access via ssh.
i have a text file that contains special (unprintable) characters, what editor i can use to exam what those character are???
i use vi, but i don't know what is ^@
may be an editor that can show ASCII as dec or hex.
Is 'file' able to identify it?
It may be a unicode RTF document, or an image file like TIF.
-Ross
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