CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixkeyboardasciihexdumpxxd
carl.hiass
carl.hiass

Reputation: 1774

How to see what various control characters are as sent by my keyboard

Usually I will use xxd to see what characters I type translate to in hex. For example:

$ xxd

hello
00000000: 0a68 656c 6c6f 0a                        .hello.

However, how would I do the same for:

It seems when I enter either of these three it 'does something' outside the xxd program, rather than being recognized as a keyboard input for which I want to see the hex codes. So how can I see those values sent by my keyboard for all character combinations?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 424

Answers (1)

r3mainer
r3mainer

Reputation: 24587

In the command line console, you can enter codes like Ctrl-Z by first entering Ctrl-V.

So for example, if you type in the following:

xxd <<<'Ctrl-VCtrl-A'

Then you should see the following output:

00000000: 010a                                     ..

(where, as I'm sure you realise, the 01 corresponds to ^A and 0a is the line break that comes after it)

On an ANSI terminal, you can enter escape codes in this way too. For example, type in this:

echo 'Ctrl-VEsc[1;31mHelloCtrl-VEsc[0m world'

to print one word in bright red and another in the default colour.

Upvotes: 1

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