Question

Which option is used with cat command for displaying non-printable characters?

(a) -v

(b) -n

(c) -x

(d) -a

I had been asked this question in an online quiz.

My doubt stems from Displaying and Creating Files: cat Command in portion Handling Ordinary Files of Unix

Answer 1

Correct answer is (a) -v

To elaborate: If the file that we want to display contains nonprintable ASCII characters, then to display those characters we use -v option with the cat command. -n option is used for displaying the contents of the file along with line numbers.