wikipedia:cat -v
-v Display non-printing characters so they are visible. Control
characters print as ‘^X’ for control-X; the delete character (octal
0177) prints as ‘^?’. Non-ASCII characters (with the high bit set)
are printed as ‘M-’ (for meta) followed by the character for the low
7 bits.
Related
^H
See also
cat
, tac
, more
, less
, tail
, mtail
, echo
, stdin
, tr
, column
, paste
, truncate
, logrotate
, xzcat
pv
, progress
, sort
, ncat
, virt-cat
, awk
, join
, col
, fold
, tee
, sponge
, nfs-cat
, journalctl, ccat, icat, EOF
, lolcat