Binary or not?
Recently after listening to an episode of Hanselminutes it occurred to me that a measure of whether or not you’re a Unix geek is how often you see this kind of thing:
In short, if you don’t see it at all or have never noticed strange characters at the start of your text file, you’re likely to reply “to hear the sea?” to the question “what’s your favourite shell?”. In that case, do yourself a favour, go under the bonnet a little and learn about byte order marks (it’s all about enrichment).
Further, if it interests you enough, you may find yourself checking out the hex equivalent of your text file–how you go about that is very telling. Hanselman belied his roots by doing this:
debug Foo.txt (and then enter ‘d’)
On the other hand, having a rather more unixy background, I would do the following:
xxd Foo.txt
To be honest, debug wouldn’t have occurred to me – if I had not had cygwin installed, I would probably have ended up downloading a (free/share-ware) editor that provides such a feature.
