1

I'm a beginner in Linux world. Today I encountered something really weird. I used zcat command on a .zip file (this one, it's a manual for a motherboard: https://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/E7A70v1.0.zip). It printed output to the terminal as expected. What surprised me the most is the fact that afterwards my printer started printing binary data as text. It printed about half a page and then stopped. Can anyone tell me what happened? How is it possible? I'm using Manjaro, bash and urxvt.

Command that I used: zcat E7A70v1.0.zip

Ava
  • 191

2 Answers2

4

The output contains (among other things) a valid escape sequence telling urxvt to print the current screen: ESC[i

Thomas Dickey
  • 76,765
0

The zip archive contains a pdf file (E7A70v1.0.pdf), not a plain text file. Pdf files may (and probably do) contain binary data mixed with text.

You want to extract the pdf file with unzip E7A70v1.0.zip, and then use a pdf viewer to read the file you have extracted. You have your choice of viewers, but evince is a good one, and comes with most Linux distributions.

AndyB
  • 231