There are a lot of ways to do this. The most portable two that I know of are `sed` and `od` - they're both POSIX.

    printf '\n\r\b\t\033[01;31m' | sed -n l

It does like... `read` style escapes - C-style.

###OUTPUT

    $
    \r\b\t\033[01;31m$

`od` is a little more configurable...

    printf '\n\r\b\t\033[01;31m' |
    od -v -w12 -t c -t a -A n

     \n  \r  \b  \t 033   [   0   1   ;   3   1   m
     nl  cr  bs  ht esc   [   0   1   ;   3   1   m

If you wanna know what all of those options do you can look in `man od`, but I specify I want two types of escapes - the `-t c` backslash escapes and the `-t a` named characters.

And here's a little shell function that will poratbly print out the octal values of each byte in its arguments:

    proctal() for a do (
        while printf %o\\n "'${a:?}"
        do a=${a#?}; done
    );  done 2>/dev/null