MyTop is a handy utility for watching the queries being executed on a MySQL server from a terminal window.  It is written in Perl, and is pretty straightforward. It just does a ‘SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST’ on the database, and then displays the currently running queries.  You can sort by various columns, and in generally is just tons easier than running SHOW PROCESSLIST from the MySQL command prompt.
My database does some inserts that contain binary data. I noticed that when running mytop, and one of those queries came up, the terminal would beep and it would stop and prompt me to enter something.
To resolve, I added this to about line 970 so that it filters out most non-displayable characters.  Feel free to let me know a better regex to use. This one is pretty ugly, but works for now. (Also, wordpress might have mangled some of the slashes)
## Try to filter out binary information and still provide all of the necessary detail
$thread->{Info} =~ s/[^\\w\\d\\s\\(\\)\\[\\]\\-\\;\\:\\'\\"\\,\\.\\<\\>\\?\\/\\\\\\*\\~\\!\\@\\#\\$\\%\\^\\&\\*\\-_\\+\\=\\` ]//g;