topic Re: replacing special characters with sed in Operating System - Linux

replacing special characters with sed

Scott Guy_2 — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:31:51 GMT

I'm befuddled!!!

I have a file that I'm having issues with special characters. Each new "entry" in the file begins with a ^M^L (when viewed in vi). For some reason, every now and then, there is an extra ^M^L, so the line starts with ^M^L^M^L I don't need the second sequence.

I tried using sed as follows:
sed s/^M^L^M^L/^M^L/g file1 > file2

That isn't working. Any pointers??

Scott

Re: replacing special characters with sed

Oviwan — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:43:55 GMT

Hey

Check dos2ux:

#dos2ux file > file2

hope this works

Regards

Re: replacing special characters with sed

James R. Ferguson — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:50:24 GMT

Hi Scott:

# perl -pe 's/^\015\014\015\014/\015\014/' file

...or to update in-place:

# perl -pi.old -e 's/^\015\014\015\014/\015\014/' file

...which will preserve a copy of "file" as "file.old".

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: replacing special characters with sed

Sandman! — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:04:43 GMT

How did you type in the control characters? Hold down Ctrl-V then type M to get ^M. Similarly to get ^L hold down Ctrl-V and then type L i.e.

sed 's/

/g' infile

Re: replacing special characters with sed

Scott Guy_2 — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:06:08 GMT

That was exactly it Sandman.

Thanks to everyone for their assistance.

Re: replacing special characters with sed

Scott Guy_2 — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:07:09 GMT

Question answered by replies

Re: replacing special characters with sed

Dennis Handly — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 04:14:10 GMT

>That was exactly it Sandman.

The last time there was a thread about ^M, there was no way to enter it in a real shell but you could enter it in vi.

Did you have any problems in a shell?