I have a file that “file -b” identifies as:Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text, with CRLF, CR line terminatorsIf I ‘cat’ the file, it looks fine. Here is an example line:Edition: EnterpriseIf I use ‘less’ to view the same file, I get this: (same line)^@E^@d^@i^@t^@i^@o^@n^@:^@ ^@E^@n^@t^@e^@r^@p^@r^@i^@s^@e^@^M^@I don’t see this problem on my CentOS computers, only OpenSuse.
I’m not clear what is the problem.
The file contains 16 bit characters. And “less” is looking at it as a file of 8-bit characters. So it is seen 8 zero-bits between each char. It shows the 8 zero bits as “^@”.
If you want to see what is exactly in the file, use
od -x
Then you switch off the trials to decode the bytes into characters.
And please in the future use CODE tags around copied/pasted computer text in a post. It is the # button in the tool bar of the post editor. When applicable copy/paste complete, that is including the prompt, the command, the output and the next prompt.
Specialy in a case like this it is important for others to see what is your explaining text and what is what you see that the computer showing. Now that is rather unclear.