How do I convert a file from DOS format to UNIX format (remove CRs from CR-LF line terminators)?
Carriage return characters (CRs) are used in line ending markers on some systems. There are three different kinds of line endings in common use:
- Unix systems use Line Feeds (LFs) only.
- MS-DOS and Windows systems use CR-LF pairs.
- Old Macintosh systems use CRs only.
If you're running a script on a Unix system, the line endings need to be Unix ones (LFs only), or you will have problems. You can check the kind of line endings in use by running:
cat -e yourscript
If you see something like this:
command^M$ ^M$ another command^M$
then you need to remove the CRs. There are a plethora of ways to do this.
All these are from the [http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sed1line.txt sed one-liners page]:
sed 's/.$//' dosfile # assumes that all lines end with CR/LF sed 's/^M$//' dosfile # in bash/tcsh, press Ctrl-V then Ctrl-M sed 's/\x0D$//' dosfile # GNUism - does not work with Unix sed!
If you want to remove all CRs regardless of whether they are at the end of a line, you can use tr:
tr -d '\r' < dosfile
If you want to use the second sed example above, but without embedding a literal CR into your script:
sed $'s/\r$//' dosfile # BASH only
All of the previous examples write the modified file to standard output. Redirect the output to a new file, and then mv it over top of the original.
There are many more ways:
Some systems have a dos2unix command which can do this. Or recode, or fromdos.
In vim, you can use :set fileformat=unix to do it.
- You can use Perl:
perl -pi -e 's/\r\n/\n/' filename