Scan a file and print out a list of ASCII characters that are not used in the file which can then be safely used to delimit fields. Useful when needing to convert CSV files using "," to a single character delimiter. Piping it into less at the end (which could be redundant) stops the command characters being interpreted by the terminal.
Search in decimal rather than hex. od dumps the character list, cut to remove offsets, sort -u gives the used characters. seq gives the comparison list, but we need this sorted alphabetically for comm, which does the filtering. I drop to perl to convert back to characters (is there a better way?) and then use od to dump them in a print-safe format. Show Sample Output
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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