How to send ACTION in IRC

i'm trying to send an ACTION in irc, first of all i can't find anything about ACTION in rfc1459 so i assume it's client dependant

second, someone told me to send 'PRIVMSG target :\001ACTION foo bar\001' but i don't get that, what the hell is \001 and how do i send this char in c, my manual tells me \001 is SOH in hex, octal and decimal, i think he meant the digit 1 but that didn't work either, it just gets displayed as ACTION foo bar in the channel

>>7
i use gdb normally but i'm afraid i don't know how to set a breakpoint or whatever to view a certain part of code and how it gets executed, so far i've only used gdb to find out why programs segfault