Friday, February 20, 2009

Remove Control-M Chars in Unix using vi

UNIX treats the end of line differently than other operating systems. Sometimes when editing files in both Windows and UNIX environments, a CTRL-M character is visibly displayed at the end of each line as ^M in vi.

Type :%s/Control+V Control+M//g

and it will looks like: :%s/^M//g

In UNIX, you can escape a control character by preceeding it with a CONTROL-V. The :%s is a basic search and replace command in vi. It tells vi to replace the regular expression between the first and second slashes (^M) with the text between the second and third slashes (nothing in this case). The g at the end directs vi to search and replace globally (all occurrences).

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