Re: weird characters
On 15/1/2000 Robert Marlow (2) wrote:
this is something that's been bugging me for a long time so i hope someone
can help me out. today i did a $ tail /var/yp/bobturf/passwd.byname
and afterwards all the characters on the screen became unreadable like it
had changed to some other kinda term type or something. this happens
a fair bit when i try to view certain types of files in certain ways.
it doesn't seem to be just my computer either: i've experienced it many times
on various debian machines i've installed. it's particularly annoying because
after this happens the virtual terminal is unuseable until a reboot. commands
still execute correctly, it's just unreadable. is there any way to get around
this when it happens and what is the reason it happens anyway?
are you sure that file is ascii text and not a binary file?
if i for example run:
cat /bin/ls
my terminal gets totally screwed and unreadable but still works (hey
encrypted terminal! :))))
to fix run:
setterm -reset
or just reset, but that screws up some keybindings sometimes and you
get ^H^H^H crap again when you use backspace.
before using cat or tail on a file you are not certain to be plain text run
file filename
first that will tell you what the data is, if it responds as data, or
elf binary file or anything other then text you should not try and
run head, tail, cat etc on it.
Ethan
Reply to: