ls command

[anon10020]

Hi,

I was going through man page of ls. I was unable to understand

ls -b, --escape
that prints the octal escapes for non-graphic characters.
What does it mean " the octal escapes for non-graphic characters" ?

Regards,
Anon 10020

[anup]

Anon10020,

Please go through the chapter on console graphics where libtermcap is mentioned. Various actions on the terminal such as clearing the screen, displaying colors are done using character sequences which are sometimes called as escape sequences. The reason being that they typically start with an escape character. Now in theory output of ls -b should print the escape sequences, however, I was surprised to see that this is not the case. A Google turned up this bug:

http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-core.../msg19751.html

So, this is an issue with GNU ls and it is only recently that someone reported it .

Hope that answers your question.

Anup