Removing “corruption” returns at the end of files

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a problem I have had when editing and transferring scripts & configuration files to and from Windows to the ESX server.

If you are not careful you can get the character ^M at the end of every line. This happens if you edit a script/configuration with something like notepad (with word wrap enabled) or if you use Binary instead of Text in WinSCP.

Anyway, I posted a lengthy script which can be used to remove this corruption. The script was quite long and this week a guy on the forum posted a single line perl command that can be used to correct the problem and is more efficient. The syntax is this:

perl -pi -e ‘s/\r\ n/ \n /g’ filename.txt

It’s a regular expression that takes a string “filename” and Substitutes (s/) a Carriage Return (\r) and New Line(\n) with(/) just a New Line (\n) and does it globally (g) for all instances found in the string

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This was first published in September 2005

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