control characters

[Prashant Zanwar_4]

Hi,
I am formating a scriptfile created from script command as it is having few unwanted charcters like ^M, ^H ...I just dont want these charcters. Can I do this using vi..Please suggest.
Thanks
Prashant

[Rick Garland]

You can cat the file and pipe through the `tr` utility to be gone of the ^M

cat | tr -d '/015' >

The /015 is octal for the ^M character.

Another option is the dos2unix command.

[Sundar_7 · Accepted solution]

You are better off doing this with sed than vi

sed -e 's/^M//g' -e 's/^H//g' inputfile > output

To enter ^M and ^H in the command line, try this

and then = ^M
and then = ^H

[Andrew Merritt_2]

Doing it automatically is best without vi, as the others have suggested.

If you do want to remove the characters while you are editing the file in vi, then enter:

:1,$ s/^V^M//

Where ^V is control-V and ^M is control-M; this will remove all the ^M chars. Control-V escapes the next character and lets you enter it without it having its normal effect. The ^V won't display in the command on the screen.

To remove all the ^H chars:

:1,$ s/^V^H//g

(the 'g' is needed as there could be more than one ^H on a line)

Andrew

[bhavin asokan]

dear prashant,

try this

cat filename |col -bx >filename1

this will remove the junk characters.
regds,