Getting rid of the ^M characters in vi
If you’re a regular vi user, you may have noticed that some files, when being edited in vi, contain ^M characters at line ends.
This usually happens when you edit a file using certain windows-editors, then transfer it to your *nix machine.
Luckily, it is easily to get rid of this control character. While in vi, execute the following command:
:1,$s/^M//g
Important note: do not manually type a caret then the capital M character. Actually, in order to type ^M, press CTRL+V followed by CTRL+M.
A quick note: the above command will look for the ^M character starting on line 1, replacing it ($s) with nothing (thus having the two consecutive forward slashes / with nothing in between). And this replacement is done globally (g).
January 1st, 2009 in
Linux
Um … just a note, your explanation of the $ is wrong.
1,$ means “lines 1 through the end of the file”
s means “search and replace” (or some such nonsense)
g technically means “do it through the whole line” (otherwise it just does the first time it finds it)
the rest of your explanation was spot-on. But, for example, you could say:
3,15s/^M//
to mean, replace all occurrences on lines 3 through 15. The “g” probably doesn’t matter to you, because you only get one per line anyway.
~Prosthetic Lips
cheers
s means “substitute” not “search and replace”. And it isn’t nonsense.
Searching, of course, is achieved using with the forward slash / character.
[...] Tips and Tricks » Blog Archive » Getting rid of the ^M characters in viJan 1, 2009 … Prosthetic LipsJanuary 21st, 2011 at 10:26 PM. Um … just a note, your explanation of the $ is wrong. 1,$ means “lines 1 through the end of the … [...]