Show special characters in Unix while using 'less' Command

You can do that with cat and that pipe the output to less:

cat -e yourFile | less

This excerpt from man cat explains what -e means:

   -e     equivalent to -vE

   -E, --show-ends
          display $ at end of each line

   -v, --show-nonprinting
          use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB

less will look in its environment to see if there is a variable named LESS

You can set LESS in one of your ~/.profile (.bash_rc, etc, etc) and then anytime you run less from the comand line, it will find the LESS.

Try adding this

export LESS="-CQaix4"

This is the setup I use, there are some behaviors embedded in that may confuse you, so you can find out about what all of these mean from the help function in less, just tap the 'h' key and nose around, or run less --help.

Edit:

I looked at the help, and noticed there is also an -r option

-r  -R  ....  --raw-control-chars  --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
                Output "raw" control characters.

I agree that cat may be the most exact match to your stated needs.

cat -vet file | less

Will add '$' at end of each line and convert tab char to visual '^I'.

cat --help
   (edited)
    -e                       equivalent to -vE
    -E, --show-ends          display $ at end of each line
    -t                       equivalent to -vT
    -T, --show-tabs          display TAB characters as ^I
    -v, --show-nonprinting   use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB

I hope this helps.

In the same spirit as https://stackoverflow.com/a/6943976/7154924:

cat -A

-A, --show-all
       equivalent to -vET
-v, --show-nonprinting
       use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB
-E, --show-ends
       display $ at end of each line
-T, --show-tabs
       display TAB characters as ^I

Alternatively, or at the same time, you can pipe to tr to substitute arbitrary characters to the desired ones for display, before piping to a pager like less if desired.

For less use -u to display carriage returns (^M) and backspaces (^H), or -U to show the previous and tabs (^I) for example:

$ awk 'BEGIN{print "foo\bbar\tbaz\r\n"}' | less -U 
foo^Hbar^Ibaz^M

(END)

Without the -U switch the output would be:

fobar   baz

(END)

See man less for more exact description of the features.