What is the “M- notation” and where is it documented?
The Man-Page of cat says: -v, --show-nonprinting use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB What is the M- notation and where is it documented? Example: $cat log -A wrote 262144 bytes from file test.x in 9.853947s (25.979 KiB/s)^M$ ^M> ^H^H ^H^H> What means ^M and ^H ? I was wondering this too. I checked the source but it seemed easier to create a input file to get the mapping. I created a test input file with a Perl scrip for( my $i=0 ; $i < 256; $i++ ) { print ( sprintf( "%c is %d %x\n", $i, $i ,$i ) ); } and then ran it through cat -v Also if you see M-oM-;M-? at the start of a file it