Sean, Here's a long answer to a short problem. cat'ing binary files is not usually desirable. What is happening is that some of the binary codes are interpreted as control characters and are fed to /dev/tty... and to your screen. These alter your display and the result is unreadable. Sometimes they will give new color schemes, sometimes strange graphic characters and sometimes will render that tty session unusable.
The first thing to try is [ stty sane ] stty means set-tty. With it you can set erase characters and loads of other things about your terminal session. 'sane' is an stty command which attempts to restore your terminal session to a 'sane' state. It use to work better on old tty terminals but now with telnet sessions, ssh and xwindows clients it doesn't function so well. Still, "stty sane" is the first thing to try. After that you can "exit" or log off or kill the session from another tty session. Now, with regard to viewing binary files safely there are a few tricks to try. The command 'strings' [strings filename] will put out only the printable ascii characters in filename, withholding anything non-printable such as the junk that screws up your tty session. You can view a word document this way and see all the text without the formatting. There is a utility I like called 'hexdump' it has various options that allow display of each byte or bit string as ascii, octal, hex and a few other things. With this you can see the contents of a file with printable characters displayed in ascii and non-printable characters displayed in octal, hex or binary. This is preferable to using 'cat'. Check: man hexdump for the various options. cat, but the way, is short for 'concatenate'. when you string several filenames after the 'cat' command it will concatenate them in the output stream. That is handy sometimes. By default, cat writes to standard output and, by default, stdout is your terminal session. That is why cat is used to display ascii files on the screen. With regard to server space, I'll respond to that in a separate email since that brings up a separate issue. Wayne --- Sean Dembrosky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I thought of you first when I ran into this problem, > I think you would have a quick and easy answer to > it... > I try to 'cat' a binary file, like let's say > /boot/message although other (binary?) files do this > as well. It concatenates a binary type read, and > leaves my bash prompt "binarized", everythings > jarbled and crazy. The only way out, is to type > 'exit' amidst the binary craziness. What is going > on here? > > By the way, I have a large server space available, > if you are interested in conducing some experiments > through it, let me know, and I'd be glad to oblidge. > > Sean Dembrosky > > __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more http://tax.yahoo.com
