sed & awk, 2nd Edition

List

The list command (l) displays the contents of the pattern space, showing non-printing characters as two-digit ASCII codes. It is similar in function to the list (:l) command in vi. You can use this command to detect “invisible” characters in the input.^[6]

$ cat test/spchar
Here is a string of special characters: ^A  ^B
^M ^G

$ sed -n -e "l" test/spchar
Here is a string of special characters: \01 \02 
\15 \07

$ # test with GNU sed too
$ gsed -n -e "l" test/spchar
Here is a string of special characters: \01  \02
\r \a

Because the list command causes immediate output, we suppress the default output or we would get duplicate copies of the lines.

You cannot match a character by ASCII value (nor can you match octal values) in sed.^[7] Instead, you have to find a key combination in vi to produce it. Use CTRL-V to quote the character. For instance, you can match an ESC character (^[). Look at the following script:

# list line and replace ^[ with "Escape"
l
s/^[/Escape/

Here’s a one-line test file:

The Great ^[ is a movie starring Steve McQueen.

Running the script produces the following output:

The Great \33 is a movie starring Steve McQueen.
The Great Escape is a movie starring Steve McQueen.

GNU sed produces this:

The Great \1b is a movie starring Steve McQueen.
The Great Escape is a movie starring Steve McQueen.

The ^[ character was made in vi by entering CTRL-V, then pressing the ESC key.

Stripping Out Non-Printable Characters from nroff Files

The UNIX formatter nroff produces output for ...