KarkomaOnline

Today I’ve downloaded a text file and I’ve found a lot of CTRL+M (15 octal character) garbage characters. This could be caused by a mistake when downloading the file with FTP bin mode enabled… who knows…

Anyway, our friend the tr command is here to help…

tr, as the man page tells, translates or deletes characters. If you want to delete those characters try this:

tr -d ‘\15′ < annoying_file.txt > clean_file.txt

Be careful! The above command will delete the CTRL+M characters. It’s better to substitute them by line breaks:

tr ‘\15′ ‘\12′ < annoying_file.txt > clean_file.txt

If you want to delete the original file…

tr ‘\15′ ‘\12′ < annoying_file.txt > clean_file.txt && rm annoying_file.txt

This little trick allows you to share your terminal session with other users. For example, it could be helpful for making remote demos of GNU/Linux to your unexperienced users or to capture what you do in a session.

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