Re: about showing all characters including non-printable, control etc

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) writes:

> Well, there shouldn't be tabs in text files (but Makefiles, as a
> legacy exception).  Use  M-x untabify RET to replace them by spaces.

Its not my choice... should or shouldn't is meaningless here.
If they are not tabs rsnapshot will fail so its necessary to se what
is there and make sure its tab or tabs.

> Now, you can use M-x whitespace-global-mode RET
> and toggle on the M-x whitespace-toggle-spacetab-check RET
> that will show you when there are spaces before tabs.
>
> You could modify the whitespace-spacetab-regexp to match any sequence
> of space and tab containing at least one tab, or just tabs.

Apparently something has to be loaded to use whitespace-global-mode.
My emacs knows nothing about it.

C-h i <RET> m <RET> i whitespace-global-mode <RET>

Info doesn't know about it either.

Finally:
grep -r whitespace-global-mode /usr/share/emacs/23.1.50
Shows the name has been aliased to:
 usr/share/emacs/23.1.50/etc/NEWS.22:*** 
 `global-whitespace-mode' is a new alias for `whitespace-global-mode'.

M-x load-library <RET> global-whitespace-mode

Loads the source file... but still setting the check call fails here:

  M-x whitespace-toggle-s<tab>  fails to find anything

Maybe more names are changed?
What version of emacs are you running.