ASA(1)

🌸 ASA(1) 🌸

okay bestie, meet asa — the little Unix cutie from the Korn shell utilities that interprets carriage-control characters. it’s giving vintage printer main character energy, and honestly? iconic. 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

asa — interpret carriage-control characters. no cap, that’s the whole job. 🎀

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💖 SYNOPSIS 💖

asa [ options ] [file ... ]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

asa writes its input files to standard output, mapping carriage control characters to line-printer control sequences. lowkey a glow-up for old-school print output. ✨

The first character of each line or record is removed from the input, and it gets processed like this before the rest of the line is output:

• 0 — a new-line is output. 🫶
• 1 — advance to the next page. page-turn moment. 🎀
• + — overwrite the previous line. not me erasing history. 💀
• space character — just output the remainder of the line. chill. 🌸

Any other character as the first character is treated as if it were a space. periodt. 💅

If no file operands are given, or if the file is -, asa reads from standard input. The start of the file is defined as the current offset. iykyk. 🌈

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -r reclen — if reclen is greater than zero, the file is assumed to consist of fixed length records of length reclen. bestie, fixed-length record era. 🍓

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💜 EXIT STATUS 💜

• 0 — Success. slay. ✨
• >0 — An error occurred. 😭

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

lpr(1) — go team. 🫶

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👑 IMPLEMENTATION 👑

version

asa (AT&T Research) 2003-03-25

author

David Korn <dgk@research.att.com>

license

http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/reuse

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🫶 cute sign-off: source/version asa (AT&T Research) 2003-03-25, dated 2012-08-01. bye bestie, go interpret those carriage-control characters! 💖