Remove carriage return in Unix

Question

What is the simplest way to remove all the carriage returns \r from a file in Unix?

Answer 1

tr -d '\r' < infile > outfile

See tr(1)

Answer 2

The simplest way on Linux is, in my humble opinion,

sed -i 's/\r//g' <filename>

The strong quotes around the substitution operator 's/\r//' are essential. Without them the shell will interpret \r as an escape+r and reduce it to a plain r, and remove all lower case r. That's why the answer given above in 2009 by Rob doesn't work.

And adding the /g modifier ensures that even multiple \r will be removed, and not only the first one.

Answer 3

sed -i s/\r// <filename> or somesuch; see man sed or the wealth of information available on the web regarding use of sed.

One thing to point out is the precise meaning of "carriage return" in the above; if you truly mean the single control character "carriage return", then the pattern above is correct. If you meant, more generally, CRLF (carriage return and a line feed, which is how line feeds are implemented under Windows), then you probably want to replace \r\n instead. Bare line feeds (newline) in Linux/Unix are \n.

Answer 4

Old School:

tr -d '\r' < filewithcarriagereturns > filewithoutcarriagereturns

Answer 5

Once more a solution... Because there's always one more:

perl -i -pe 's/\r//' filename

It's nice because it's in place and works in every flavor of unix/linux I've worked with.

Answer 6

I've used python for it, here my code;

end1='/home/.../file1.txt'
end2='/home/.../file2.txt'
with open(end1, "rb") as inf:
     with open(end2, "w") as fixed:
        for line in inf:
            line = line.replace("\n", "")
            line = line.replace("\r", "")
            fixed.write(line)