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Quick tip: get rid of pesky Windows newlines from the Linux command line

Posted by Jack on 07/14/2009
in

Today I used the Windows Notepad to save a text file onto my Debian server, thinking that I'd be able to view it easily using vi. But when I tried to do so, every line ended with an "^M". Those "^M"s are newline characters. Windows and Linux use different newline characters, so in order to have a Windows text document display properly in Linux, some conversion is needed. I used the handy tr command like so:

0 jack@srv-01:~$ cat text_windows.txt | tr -d \\r > text_unix.txt

And now the "^M"s are gone! Of course, text_unix.txt now looks funky in Windows, but for my purposes that's just fine; you could always save a Windows version and a Linux version if you'll need to view your file from both operating systems.

Comments

Submitted by Shot on Wed, 09/09/2009 - 7:11am

You can streamline this with

sudo aptitude install tofrodos

and then

dos2unix text_windows.txt

and

unix2dos text_windows.txt

(if necessary) – the benefit being you don’t need to remember the current newline characters in the file, the tools simply won’t alter the file if its in the target newline standard already.

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