[techtalk] Partial execution of /etc/rc.d/rc.M

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2000 at 09:28:41PM -0500 or thereabouts, Subba Rao wrote:
> 
> Assuming there are some hidden characters in the rc.M file, I deleted 
> the problem portion of the file, and retyped them. That did not help 
> either. If there are some hidden characters in a text file, how do I 
> find them out?

I looked at the file you pasted, but I have no suggestions. For locating
odd characters, here's some suggestions I haven't seen yet. (I hope
someone is collecting all these up :))

cat -v  (cat --show-non-printing)
dog -v  (dog --show-non-printing)
             (dog is one of the more useful things I found on Freshmeat.
             There's nothing in it you can't do with standard unix
             commands, but it bunches them all together.)
joe     I have found that joe will show up control characters sometimes.
        I suspect plenty of other editors will do this, and I'll bet
        emacs has entire modes devoted to it :) joe will also do things
        like display backticks and some other things (the UK pound
        sign for one) as other characters if you edit files with them
        in, which is a pain in the neck. 
less -r (less --raw-control-chars)

There is stuff in the (long!) man page for less about altering your
"LESSCHARSET", which affects what get treated as normal, control
and binary characters, and explains about how they're displayed.
But I don't understand it well enough to summarise :)

I recall viewing a file which had some dodgy characters in with
Lynx once: the characters were in a <a href="blah blah"> tag and the
Lynx prompt that tells you what the highlighted link is made a
valiant effort to display them as something. But that is hardly
a useful way to find them: they just happened to show up :)

There are some more, some of which are more aimed at this kind
of thing, but I forget what they are!

If you deleted and retyped the relevant parts of the file, I
suspect it's the contents rather than anything 'hidden' in it.

Telsa

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