What does ^M character mean in Vim?

Question

I keep getting ^M character in my vimrc and it breaks my configuration.

Answer 1

You can fix this in vim using

:1,$s/^V^M//g

where ^ is the control character.

Answer 2

It probably means you've got carriage returns (different operating systems use different ways of signaling the end of line).

Use dos2unix to fix the files or set the fileformats in vim:

set ffs=unix,dos

Answer 3

try :%s/\^M// At least this worked for me.

Answer 4

To translate the new line instead of removing it:

:%s/\r/\r/g

Answer 5

In Unix it is probably easier to use 'tr' command.

cat file1.txt | tr "\r" "\n" > file2.txt

Answer 6

I got a text file originally generated on a Windows Machine by way of a Mac user and needed to import it into a Linux MySQL DB using the load data command.

Although VIM displayed the '^M' character, none of the above worked for my particular problem, the data would import but was always corrupted in some way. The solution was pretty easy in the end (after much frustration).

Solution: Executing dos2unix TWICE on the same file did the trick! Using the file command shows what is happening along the way.

$ file 'file.txt'
file.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF, CR line terminators

$ dos2unix 'file.txt'
dos2unix: converting file file.txt to UNIX format ...
$ file 'file.txt'
file.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

$ dos2unix 'file.txt'
dos2unix: converting file file.txt to UNIX format ...
$ file 'file.txt'
file.txt: ASCII text

And the final version of the file imported perfectly into the database.