unicode - A basic unicode listing tool

Build

To build, a C compiler like GCC or Clang is needed. It can simply be compiled with

gcc -O2 -o unicode unicode.c # for GCC
clang -O2 -o unicode unicode.c # for Clang

Once installed, the UCD needs to be installed locally on your system. The UCD can be found here: https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/ Download UCD.zip and either place the content

• in /usr/local/share/unicode (you need to create the unicode directory if it doesn't exist); or
• anywhere else, but don't forget you have pass -D /path/to/UnicodeData.txt for every invocation.

Once this is done, test it by running ./unicode 20, and you should get:

U+0020: SPACE
 Category: Separator, Space
 Text direction: Whitespace

If you get the message Unable to open UCD file, that means that the unicode directory is not placed in the correct path or that you passed the wrong path to -D. Check the paths and then try again.

Install

To install globally, run the following commands:

sudo cp unicode /usr/local/bin/unicode
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/unicode
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/unicode

Note that it's strongly recommended that you place the UCD in the global directory if you plan to install globally, so everyone on the system can use it without any additional work.