Different ways to delete ^M character in a file

Control-M is a character found at the end of a line usually in files transferred from windows. Before, processing these files in UNIX, we need to remove the ^M characters. Let us see in this article, the different ways to delete the Control-M from the files:

Consider a file, file1, which has the control M characters: 

$ cat -v file1
a^M
b^M
c^M
d^M
e^M
f^M



The -v option in cat command shows the file with non-printable characters if any. Here we have used it to display the Control-M characters without which it would not have got displayed.

1. dos2unix The simplest of all is using the dos2unix command.Some Unix flavors have a command, dos2unix, to handle the dos files in which the control character Control-M is automatically removed. This command updates the source file itself directly. 

$ dos2unix file1
2. tr Using tr itself, we can do this using 2 ways:
$ tr -d '^M' <file1

Note: When typing the above command, the Control-M should be entered like: Control-V+Control-M, and not as Shift-6-M.
The "-d" option of tr deletes the occurrences of Control-M. To confirm the above output does not contain Control-M, pipe the output of the above command to "cat -v". 

$ tr -d '^M' <file1 | cat -v

The above command does not update the source file, instead, it just displays the file1 contents without Control-M. To update the source file, redirect the output to a temporary file, and rename it to the source file. 

$ tr -d '\015' <file1 >file2
$ mv file2 file1

The other way to get the same thing done using tr is to use the escape sequence of Control-M which is 015. 

$ tr -d "\015" <file1

3. sed The replacement of Control-M using sed can be done as shown below: 

$ sed 's/^M//g' file1

The above command all the occurrences of Control-M with nothing. In other words, it simply removes the occurrences of Control-M. If your sed has '-i' option, you can remove the Control-M directly in the file itself: 

$ sed -i 's/^M//g' file1

4. vi In vi, we can substitute all the ^M characters with nothing. Open the source file in vi, and give the below command in the escape mode: 

 :%s/^M//

5. awk The sub function in awk can be used for the substitution. The 1 is used to print the lines. 

$ awk 'sub(/^M/,"");1' file1

6. perl perl too provides the substitution as in sed. 

$ perl -p -e 's/^M//g' file1

Perl also has the '-i' option which edits the file in place. 

$ perl -pi -e 's/^M//g' file1