From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!sun!megatest!fortune!hpda!hplabs!sri-unix!gamma@EDN-UNIX
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: rm ABC*
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.805
Posted: Wed Mar 23 08:29:49 1983
Received: Tue Apr  5 02:47:51 1983

From:  W. J. Showalter <gamma@EDN-UNIX>

We are still running V6 Unix at EDN so this may not work for other releases.
However, I wrote a small program some time ago to take care of removing
unprintable characters.  I called it "ctrl" and use it as a filter.

ls

produces

prog1.c
prog2.c
prog3.c


ls | ctrl

will produce

p r o g 1 . c
p o r ^H ^H r o g 2 . c
p r o g 3 . c

The second file name was one of those which had a couple of backspaces
imbeded in the name.  This enables the user to reproduce exactly, the name of
the file ( assuming of course that the imbeded control/non-printable
character will not cause adverse reaction by the system ).  An example of
such a reaction is that of Control P on the DEC 11/70 console which
throws the terminal into the soft console mode.

Other possibilities are imbeded blanks.  This can be taken care of by
simply enclosing the culprit in quotes ( e.g. rm "file one" "file two" )

Some characters may have to be escaped ( e.g. rm "file\@" ) to remove "file@",
assuming that '\' is the escape character.


Here is the ctrl filter.

main ()
{
    char    C;
    int     i;
    putchar (' ');
    while ((C = getchar ()) != 0)
    {
	if (C < 040 )
	{
	    putchar ('^');
	    putchar (C + 0100);
	    if ( C == 015 || C == 012 )
		putchar(C);
	}
	else
	    putchar (C);
	putchar (' ');
    };
    exit();
}


Comments are welcome.

Jim Showalter   GAMMA@EDN-UNIX