Special Character Problem

[Dave Ihnat]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 11:56:19PM -0400, Raymond C. Rodgers wrote:
> <<character issue elided>>

First, remember--there is no 'character', as such.  It's just a
hex byte.  What character is associated with it on display depends on
interpretation--if it's not a byte that maps to a real character in your
current character set, you'll get some sort of "invalid character"
marker.

SO--if you know the hex representation of the 'character' in the password
string, remember that 'od' is your friend.

You can do something like

	cat <<! >foobar
	TYPE IN CHARACTERS
	!

where, in "TYPE IN CHARACTERS", you can do everything from normal characters
(probably for reference points in the stream) to control characters and
Alt-xxx codes.  After you enter the exclamation point on a line by itself,
you'll have a file 'foobar' that you can then do

	od -c foobar | less

and examine the resultant byte codes.

G'luck,
--
	Dave Ihnat
	dihnat at dminet.com