How to delete ^M characters from a file ?

[Preet Dhillon]

Dear Colleagues,

I have a text file with each line terminated by a ^M character. I can see these at the end of each line if I open the file in vi. I've tried sed, tr and global search and replace in vi but the ^M still appears when I view the file. Is there a way of removing this control character?
Many thanks and regards,
Preet

[Dietmar Konermann · Accepted solution]

Preet,

$ whence dos2ux
/usr/bin/dos2ux

dos2ux outfile

Regards...
Dietmar.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

If there are *only* ^M's (and no LF's)

# perl -pe 's/\r/\n/g' infile > outfile

If there is (M$ like) CRLF line endings

# perl -pe 's/\r$//' infile > outfile

If it is (Mac like) LFCR line endings

# perl -pe 's/^\r//g' infile > outfile


HTH

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

probably ftp as nim instead of ascii file ?

anyway you can the following filter :
cat | tr -d "\r" >

simple.

Jean-Luc

[Trond Haugen]

dos2ux can tak care of that: 'dos2ux file >file.ux'.
Within vi you can do it with ':g/^M/s///'.
The '^M' is one character and is composed by 'Ctrl-v Ctrl-m'.

Regards,
Trond

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

similarly, before transfering text files to winders, you might want to ux2dos

Later,
Bill

[Sean OB_1]

Preet,

dos2ux is the way to go. It's a little utility made just for this.

dos2ux fixedfile

Typically this is caused by uploading a text file as binary instead of ascii.

Although I've seen some systems where unzip'ing a zip file containing text files ends up with the same problems.

[Kyoungjin Kim_1]

Hello,


Please try
# cat infile | col -b > outfile

This can be helpful when you'd like to save man pages into an ascii file.

Hope this helps.

[Mynor Diaz]

Preet,

Here is the anwer to your question. I encountered the same problem with a program I was sent a few months ago. The origin of the problem was the way the programmers compiled the code, so when the files were sent to me in a zip file, it did not matter how I sent (ftp) them to the Unix server I am using, they all had the metacharacter. You can find the solution here:

http://icarus.weber.edu/home/bob/cs213/rm_ctr_m.html

You may also want to look at this forum discussion:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xae5f7d4cf554d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html