Generating Octal/Hex Codes from Bourne Shell

[Leo de Wit]

In article <118 at gillxp> rg at gillxp (Richard J. Gill) writes:
>I have the need  be able  to generate the full ASCII character
>set from the Bourne shell. There is no problem on my NCR Tower
>XP (System V); I simply use the following syntax:
>
>		echo "\007"	# 0x07
>		echo "\0212"	# 0x8a
>		 ...
>
>On my Fortune 32:16 (Forpro 2.0 - Sys 3v7 & BSD 4.3), however,
>the string is simply displayed as a literal.  Any ideas on how I
>can generate the fully ASCII set from the Bourne shell on the
>Fortune? 

On BSD you can use tr(1) which understands octal codes just in the
way your echo does in System V; the two examples could be rewritten
as:
      tr a "\007"  <<EOT
a
EOT

      tr a "\0212" <<EOT
a
EOT

The a character acts as a dummy and is translated to the octal coded
character. If you use these characters a lot, it would make sense to
save the output of tr into shell variables.
Hope this helps?
                   Leo.