If you run 'od -t a' then the high bit is silently stripped out of the
input. This can cause a bit of confusion (especially when dealing
with char 160 (non-breaking space) in ISO-8859-1 which strips down to
a regular space...)
I suggest that when 'od -t a' encounters the first high-bit-set
character in the input it should print a warning that the bit is being
ignored, and that if you have input files that might not be pure ASCII
then 'od -t c' might be a better choice. This warning could be
disabled when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
If you don't want to do that, please update the help text and info
documentation to make it clear that the 'a' format maps high-bit-set
characters onto the same output as ASCII, and so probably isn't what
you want if you are trying to see what characters a byte stream
contains.
--
Ed Avis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
_______________________________________________
Bug-coreutils mailing list
Bug-coreutils@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
