On Tue, 28 Aug 2007, Nate Straz wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 11:44:39AM -0500, Donovan Niesen wrote:
>> Anybody know what the ^@ character is in a text file when I view it using
>> cat -A?
>
> Usually ^@ represents null characters (hex 0x0).

Yep:

echo -n 'X' | perl -pe 's/X/\0/' | cat -A

So NULL is ascii zero (in octal, hex or dec):

man ascii

Not every system has "man ascii" but it is good to have, if you ask me.

Mike