Gentlemen: To reproduce (on Windoze):
perl -e "print chr(149)" | head perl -e "print chr(149)" | tail perl -e "print chr(149)" | cat perl -e "print chr(149)" | grep -v abc I'm pretty sure this is a bug in the Windoze port of head and tail, and it is also in grep and probably a number of other programs where I haven't encountered it yet. It ONLY beeps if it is sent to the CONSOLE. If the output is further piped into a file, the character is written as a single MW character (195 decimal, 95 hex). In other words, perl -e "print chr(149)" | head >output.txt will not corrupt the character or change it to an ASCII BEL character. Versions I'm using: head/tail (GNU coreutils) 5.3.0 Written by David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering. Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. cat (GNU coreutils) 5.3.0 Written by Torbjorn Granlund and Richard M. Stallman. GNU grep 2.5.4 Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Windows 7 "Ultimate" on a PC; cmd console. Character 149 is a Unicode C1 control character MW or "MESSAGE WAITING" character, but is turning into a C0 BEL character (character 7) by mistake. I noticed this when I was working with Chinese text encoded in UTF-8. Just outputing character 149 to the console in Windoze with another program does NOT produce this queer effect of "playing" character 7, the ASCII BEL. It's quite devastating--the machine and software are fast, and the screendump ends up freezing the console and making it impossible to interrupt with any sort of kill signal--one may only wait an hour for the beeping to stop, or else terminate the console window itself and open a fresh one. I have no idea why this should be happening--but I would appreciate it if you'd reproduce it, now that I've narrowed down exactly WHICH byte is causing this effect--or else tell me if I'm zillions of versions behind or if this is a known problem with the Windoze console that has nothing to do with the software (but then I don't understand why other programs don't mimic this behavior). Many thanks in advance for your attention. Very truly yours, Robert S. Kissel Hamden, Connecticut U.S.A.
