On 02/11/2013 02:56 AM, Tom Warzeka wrote:
Hello! I sometimes use 'cat -E' as a quick check for lines with trailing white
space. I understand that '$' was chosen as the end-of-line character due to
its usage in regular expressions. However, I like to use a more conspicuous
character, such as '@'. So, I thought, how about letting the user specify the
end-of-line character? While doable with 'sed', it was quite easy to add an
option to accomplish this. My proposed new syntax is:
cat -E -c @ ...
or
cat --show-ends --end-char=@ ...
It is minimally intrusive and does not affect backward compatibility: when one
of the new options is not specified, the end-of-line character is still '$'.
Alternatively, use of one of these options could automatically turn-on
displaying an end-of-line character
(just add "show_ends = true;" within the new case).
Here's my patch submitted for your perusal. It is applied to coreutils-8.20,
the current latest stable release. If you decide to include it, feel free to
make any changes you see fit. Thanks!
-- Tom
Why is @ (or any char) better than $ ?
If you wanted to highlight stuff you'd be better with grep or sed:
cat -E < the/file | GREP_COLOR='30;41' grep --color '[[:space:]]*\$$'
I don't think there is enough benefit for including this change.