Copyright (C) 2000-2012 |
Whole document tree Chapter 7. Special Characters: Octal Escape SequencesOutside of the characters that you can type on your keyboard, there are a lot of other characters you can print on your screen. I've created a script to allow you to check out what the font you're using has available for you. The main command you need to use to utilize these characters is "echo -e". The "-e" switch tells echo to enable interpretation of backslash-escaped characters. What you see when you look at octal 200-400 will be very different with a VGA font from what you will see with a standard Linux font. Be warned that some of these escape sequences have odd effects on your terminal, and I haven't tried to prevent them from doing whatever they do. The linedraw and block characters that are used heavily by the Bashprompt project are between octal 260 and 337 in the VGA fonts.
You can also use xfd to display all the characters in an X font, with the command xfd -fn <fontname>. Clicking on any given character will give you lots of information about that character, including its octal value. The script given above will be useful on the console, and if you aren't sure of the current font name. |