pete / cats Goto Github PK

Hi!

I'm wondering if you've come across a cat implementation that produces cat -v output that can be uniquely reversed back to the original. It may not be a historical version, but if you have looked into these cats extensively, you may have come across this functionality.

I stumbled upon a project that did just that about a year or two ago, found it interesting, but despite repeatedly combing the web for this (by searching for terms like "invertible", "reversible", "bijective", etc), I can't seem to find it again. It may have been BSD based.

By cat -v, I mean at a high level turning unprintable characters into escaped ones, coded in ASCII. I often do just that, but it would be a nice plus to get back the original should I want it.

In the plan9 version of cat, it has

argv0 = "cat";

but argv0 is never defined nor used for anything. Was this copied correctly from the source? I suspect it was supposed to be argv[0] to set the filename. (I don't have plan9 sources at hand to check)