On 30-Dec-98 Ryan King wrote: > Knowing the answer to this question doesn't matter much, but I am > curious... > > Why does a VC go bonkies when you cat a binary file from it? What doesn't > make sense to me is that only some of the chars display wrong, and that > it's only the display that is ruined, but the actual characters are intact > as far as bash is concerned. > > I know all you have to do to un-junk it is `echo C-v ESC c`, (which helped > me a lot before I learned about the `file` command), but I'm still curious. > > Anyone know what is happening?
Some of the sequences in the file are seen as escape sequences, that is why. Ascii 26 is Ctrl-Z -- but the binary number 26 good exist and be in the file. So when that gets output a Ctrl-Z is entered in the console. And so on and so forth.
