Funny thing with 'cat' cmd

[vickey_20]

hey there
I noticed a funny thing happening with cat cmd. When on prompt (root) i typed cat * and executed it . My monitor was bombarded with alien character and it kept on runnning for sometime , after breaking out of it my promt became unreadable does anyone know y is it happenig.....

[matonb]

depends where you ran it. But sounds like your cat command included binary files....
That can often screw up your session.

[vickey_20]

hey thanks for replying bro. I'm writing this here cause you don't want any PM. Although I got you point but do you have any idea why is it happening like that?

[matonb]

Well binary files are full of non printing control characters, some sequences get interpreted and screw up your session.

Why would you want to "cat" everything anyway? If your looking for something use grep...

[i92guboj]

"cat *" means "cat everything in the current directory", which will show the contents of all the files in the current dir (that's what * stands for).

Between all the files probably there were some binary (i.e. files that do not contain plain text). These files contains characters that can screw up your display since they are not interpreted as text as matonb said.

[bigtomrodney]

When you cat a binary file and mess up your terminal, you can run the command reset to fix your terminal for you.

[matonb]

Well pointed out bigtom, ye ol' reset has has come in handy a few times

[vickey_20]

Cheers guys thanks for helping me out