I meant that "echo -e" transforms the four characters "\033" into a single byte, for example. Thus, the sequence is "interpreted" by echo. Then, the cat progra

I meant that "echo -e" transforms the four characters "\033" into a single byte, for example. Thus, the sequence is "interpreted" by echo. Then, the cat program just copies the bytes without looking at them. If you want "cat" to escape these bytes so that they are not seen by the terminal you can use the "-v" option.