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

I'm going to assume you mean carriage returns (CR, "\r", 0x0d) at the ends of lines rather than just blindly within a file (you may have them in the middle of strings for all I know). Using this test file with a CR at the end of the first line only:

$ cat infile
hello
goodbye

$ cat infile | od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o  \r  \n   g   o   o   d   b   y   e  \n
0000017

dos2unix is the way to go if it's installed on your system:

$ cat infile | dos2unix -U | od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o  \n   g   o   o   d   b   y   e  \n
0000016

If for some reason dos2unix is not available to you, then sed will do it:

$ cat infile | sed 's/\r$//' | od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o  \n   g   o   o   d   b   y   e  \n
0000016

If for some reason sed is not available to you, then ed will do it, in a complicated way:

$ echo ',s/\r\n/\n/
> w !cat
> Q' | ed infile 2>/dev/null | od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o  \n   g   o   o   d   b   y   e  \n
0000016

If you don't have any of those tools installed on your box, you've got bigger problems than trying to convert files :-)

Answer 2

There's a utility called dos2unix that exists on many systems, and can be easily installed on most.

Answer 3

If you are a Vi user, you may open the file and remove the carriage return with:

:%s/\r//g

or with

:1,$ s/^M//

Note that you should type ^M by pressing ctrl-v and then ctrl-m.

Answer 4

try this to convert dos file into unix file:

fromdos file

Answer 5

If you're using an OS (like OS X) that doesn't have the dos2unix command but does have a Python interpreter (version 2.5+), this command is equivalent to the dos2unix command:

python -c "import sys; import fileinput; sys.stdout.writelines(line.replace('\r', '\n') for line in fileinput.input(mode='rU'))"

This handles both named files on the command line as well as pipes and redirects, just like dos2unix. If you add this line to your ~/.bashrc file (or equivalent profile file for other shells):

alias dos2unix="python -c \"import sys; import fileinput; sys.stdout.writelines(line.replace('\r', '\n') for line in fileinput.input(mode='rU'))\""

... the next time you log in (or run source ~/.bashrc in the current session) you will be able to use the dos2unix name on the command line in the same manner as in the other examples.

Answer 6

If you are running an X environment and have a proper editor (visual studio code), then I would follow the reccomendation:

Visual Studio Code: How to show line endings

Just go to the bottom right corner of your screen, visual studio code will show you both the file encoding and the end of line convention followed by the file, an just with a simple click you can switch that around.

Just use visual code as your replacement for notepad++ on a linux environment and you are set to go.