Shouldn't cat(1) use the C locale?

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 6 May 2009 10:31:38 +0200 (CEST), Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> said:

> I think this is a bug in the manual page.  When cat(1) is
> using the current locale, that's perfectly correct behaviour
> in a world that is clearly moving away from ASCII, towards
> unicode.

Maybe your part of the world....

> So I think the manual page should be fixed so it says that
> the -v option handles non-printing characters in the current
> locale, and cat needs to be fixed to handle multibyte chars
> correctly if the -v option is used with a UTF locale.

This is a Bad Idea.  cat -v ought to work properly when the input does
not consist of "characters" at all.

-GAWollman