'^M' character at end of lines

Question

When I run a particular SQL script in Unix environments, I'm am seeing a '^M' character at the end of each line of the SQL script as it is echoed to the command-line. I don't know on which OS the SQL script was originally created.

What is causing this and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

The SQL script was originally created on a Windows OS. The '^M' characters are a result of Windows and Unix having different ideas about what to use for an end-of-line character. You can use perl at the command line to fix this.

perl -pie 's/\r//g' filename.txt

Answer 2

In Perl, if you don't want to set the $/ variable and use chomp() you can also do:

$var =~ /\r\n//g;

My two cents

Answer 3

It's caused by the DOS/Windows line-ending characters. Like Andy Whitfield said, the Unix command dos2unix will help fix the problem. If you want more information, you can read the man pages for that command.

Answer 4

Convert DOS/Windows (\r\n) line endings to Unix (\n) line endings, with tr:

tr '\r\n' '\n' < dosFile.txt > unixFile.txt

Post about replacing newlines from the Unix command line