UNICODE-SHOW(1)

NAME
unicode-show - Scan and annotate suspicious Unicode characters

NAME
unicode-show - detect and annotate non-ASCII or suspicious Unicode characters in text or files

SYNOPSIS
unicode-show [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION
unicode-show is a utility that reads text input (from standard input or files) and highlights suspicious Unicode characters, such as those outside the safe ASCII range. This tool is useful for identifying potentially malicious or misleading Unicode characters in source code, logs, or user input.

For each suspicious character, <strong>unicode-show</strong> prints:

•   The line it appears on, annotated with [U+XXXX] markers

•   A description including the character (if visible), Unicode codepoint, character name, and category

  What is considered suspicious:

•   Characters outside the printable ASCII range (0x20-0x7E)

•   Control characters (excluding \n and \t)

•   Carriage returns (\r), even when used in CRLF pairs

•   Any character not in the standard set of ASCII letters, digits, punctuation, and trailing whitespace

  Output formatting:

•   Annotations are colorized using ANSI escape codes if stdout is a terminal and the environment is color-friendly

•   Red for inline [U+XXXX] markers

•   Cyan for character metadata descriptions

Color output is disabled if:

•   The environment variable $NOCOLOR is set

•   The environment variable $NO_COLOR is set to 1

•   $TERM is set to dumb

•   Output is redirected (non-interactive terminal)

OPTIONS
This tool takes no options. Any arguments are treated as file paths. If no arguments are given, input is read from standard input.

EXIT STATUS

•   0 - No suspicious Unicode characters found

•   1 - Suspicious characters were detected

•   2 - An error occurred (e.g., file I/O or decoding failure)

EXAMPLES

  Scan a file for suspicious characters:
unicode-show suspicious.txt

  Scan multiple files:
unicode-show file1.txt file2.md

  Scan input from a pipeline:
cat file1.txt | unicode-show

  Disable color output:
NOCOLOR=1 unicode-show example.txt

ENVIRONMENT

•   NOCOLOR - disables color output if set

•   NO_COLOR - disables color output if set to 1

•   TERM - if set to dumb, disables color output

AUTHOR
This man page has been written by Patrick Schleizer (adrelanos@whonix.org).