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