Nicolas Bonifas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, I think I've found a bug in cat: when I type 'cat true' (when > I'm in the directory of the 'true' binary, /bin/ on my computer), my > terminal becomes unreadable (normal characters are printed as > control characters).
It's not a bug. cat is doing what you tell it to do: it prints the contents of the "true" file. Binary files typically contain certain character sequences, purely by chance, that tell the terminal to do strange things. The terminal has this capability because occasionally it is genuinely useful, but the terminal cannot distinguish between cases where the special characters were intended to change the terminal's behavior and cases where they were only meant to be printed. You may be able to fix the terminal with the "reset" command. To keep it from happening, simply don't print random binary data to your terminal. You can safely view it using a pager like "less", though, with the appropriate options. paul _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
