# Is there a \show for catcodes?

In the course of attempting to out-pedant another mathematician, I wanted to \show the catcode of $ to convince myself that it was a "special" character in ordinary TeX as well as LaTeX. I was just using a "dumb tex" session (that is, I invoked tex from the commandline with no file) so what I wanted was to be able to type: \showcatcode$


but that didn't work. In the end, I did

\count255=\catcode$\showthe\count255  but that just doesn't smell right. What's the best way to \show the catcode of a token? (To be clear, the result of a \showcatcode should go to the terminal and the log, not in the document itself.) - I believe that \showthe works for any internal integer, even strange ones like \parshape. – TH. Jun 9 '11 at 12:19 ## 1 Answer Well, it's not complicated: \showthe\catcode$

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Now that is bizarre. I tried that and it gave me nonsense. Yet now when I try it again, it works. Did you invoke M-x quantum-butterfly again? (I suspect that my earlier experiments messed things up so that the above didn't work, but not being used to working with tex on the commandline, I didn't spot it.) –  Loop Space Jun 9 '11 at 10:53
I don't know what you met. (And I'm not an Emacser.) It does work for me, plain TeX and LaTeX. –  Leo Liu Jun 9 '11 at 11:52
Otherwise a simple \show $ will indicate that it is the math shift$, whereas \show * (say) gives the character *. –  Bruno Le Floch Jun 9 '11 at 13:25
xkcd.com/378 –  Caramdir Jun 9 '11 at 15:10
@Caramdir: Yep, I remember that I've seen it. And as a vimer, I hate emacs :) –  Leo Liu Jun 9 '11 at 15:30