Exactly what I wanted to know!. See how easy life can be?
>
> On Feb 27, 9:37am, Robert N. Eaton wrote:
>
> > Thanks, Shawn, I thought it was just me. I tried the alt+ method both at
> > the bash prompt and in vi.
>
> I haven't been following this thread closely, but vile and xvile (which
> are vi-like editors) allow you to enter arbitrary 8-bit characters. Below
> is the relevant information from vile's help document. Both vile and
> xvile are available on Red Hat's Power Tools CD. (But if you want
> Perl support, you have to build it yourself.) For more information
> regarding this editor, see http://vile.cx.
>
> 8-Bit Operation
> ---------------
> vile allows input, manipulation, and display of all 256 possible
> byte-wide characters. (Double-wide characters are not supported.)
>
> Output
> ------
> By default, characters with the high bit set (decimal value 128 or
> greater) will display as hex (or octal; see "non-printing- octal"
> above) sequences, e.g. \xA5. A range of characters which should
> display as themselves (that is, characters understood by the user's
> display terminal) may be given using the "printing-low" and
> "printing-high" settings (see above). Useful values for these
> settings are 160 and 255, which correspond to the printable range
> of the ISO-Latin-1 character set.
>
> Input
> -----
>
> There are basically three ways of getting 8-bit characters into
> a vile buffer:
>
> Directly -- if the user's input device (i.e. the terminal or
> xterm) can generate all characters, and if the terminal
> settings are such that these characters pass through
> unmolested, then vile will happily incorporate them into the
> user's text, or act on them if they are bound to functions. On
> an xterm, try "stty cs8 -parenb -istrip". Real serial lines
> may take more convincing, at both ends, but use that stty
> command as a starting point.
>
> As numbers -- the ^V prefix (or, more correctly, the key bound to
> the "quote-next-character" function), if followed by up to
> three digits, will insert a character whose value is that
> number (no greater than 255) into the buffer. The number may
> be entered in decimal (^VNNN), octal with a leading '0' (^V0NNN),
> or hex with a leading 'x' (^VxNN).
>
> As digraphs -- Perhaps more useful to some people is using a set of
> ":map!" commands to aid insertion of 8-bit text. The file
> "digraphs.rc" distributed with the vile source contains a set
> of mappings which should aid the input of ISO 8859/1 text. As
> examples, the mappings in digraphs.rc allow one to type ^KU" or
> ^Ku" to get an umlaut character, ^K12 to get the little '1/2'
> symbol, ^KY- to get the Yen currency symbol, or ^K:- to get an
> arithmetic division symbol.
>
> Users who have no need to enter 8-bit text may want access to the
> meta-bound functions while in insert mode as well as command mode.
> The mode "meta-insert-bindings" controls whether functions bound to
> meta- keys (characters with the high bit set) are executed only in
> command mode, or in both command and insert modes. In either case,
> if a character is _not_ bound to a function, then it will be
> self-inserting when in insert mode. (To bind to a meta key in the
> .vilerc file, one may specify it as itself, or in hex or octal, or
> with the shorthand 'M-c' where c is the corresponding character
> without the high bit set.
>
> (Although it is possible to edit and view all 256 characters, it is
> currently impossible to _search_ for a string that contains the NULL
> character, since this is used internally to terminate the search
> string.)
>
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