cat -v?

[Rob Sullivan]

>
> > if you add "-v", i would go the extra step and add all of "-etv" since
> > that's a fairly common incantation for examining possibly non-text
> > files.


Maybe it's not my business but I'm strongly against more programs
> including options that assume latin1 and break utf-8 text. Such broken
> programs just discourage people from abandoning legacy encodings.
>
> Rich
>

True, it's not exactly wonderful that cat assumes Latin-1, but "cat -et"
(the -v is superfluous, btw, as it's implied) appears to be a fairly
commonly used and useful set of options. It means that if a file has been
created with a non-printable character, for instance, you can just do "ls |
cat -et" and work out how to get rid of it.
Several other applets don't treat locales properly (i.e. most of them), but
if certain features weren't included, this would severely limit the
capabilities of Busybox as a whole.

I don't appear to have vis either, as an aside - perhaps adding some flags
to cat would be better.

Rob
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