Control chars displaying while doing a vi

[N. Hanson]

Whenever I transfer a file created in Windows Notepad to Unix and edit the file, a ^M appears at the end of each line(representing a carriage return). How do I get rid of those during my vi session?

[James A. Donovan · Accepted solution]

If you're using FTP to do the transfer of text files, then you should use use the ascii transfer mode not binary.

To get rid of those ^M characters run your file through the dos2ux utility

# dos2ux filename > newfilename

The reason you see the ^M is because of the difference in the way Windows handles the en-of-line character. In Windows, it is actually comprised of two characters a carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF), whereas in Unix the end of line character is simply a LF.

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi,

...And if you forget to run dos2ux before executing vi, do this last line mode command:

:%s/^m//

It substitutes the ^m on each line with nothing. To get the ^m into vi, press the ctrl key and hold it down. Then press the v key, release, then the m key, release the m and then the ctrl key. This ^v trick will work for any control character you wish to embed into your document.

--Bruce

[Steve Post]

Bruce is right. I've been doing it that way for years. Another option is if you need to automate it a little. You could make a script that removes the control-M.

#!/bin/ksh
# myscript
cat $1 | tr -d "\015" > ${1}.no_em
mv ${1}.no_em ${1}
The \015 is octal for the control-M. tr is the transliterate command.
Steve.

[Joseph C. Denman]

A better solution would be to ftp the file as ascii. The ^M are carriage returns. If you ftp the file as ascii, it will automatically convert the carriage return to a newline which is what unix uses.

Hope this helps...


...jcd...

[Printaporn_1]

Hi,
Please use dos2ux command to convert dos file to unix file

#dos2ux dosfile > unixfile

Thanks