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).

How to get the release of a Linux kernal?

I found its difficult to get the release name and version of a partilcular linux distribution by using the uname command
It can show only 'Linux myhostname and blah blah blah' . But i just wanted to know which distribution and release i'm running. so after a small research i found the command which is very helpful for the purpose.

cat etc/*release

that will display the distribution name and release like :

Red Hat Linux release 7.1 (Seawolf)

Bingo!!!