Darren Beale's Web Log

Removing DOS linebreaks from your files using Vim

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This morning I’m debugging an issue on a script that gets cronned every minute. I’ve a shell open on the server and the file in question open using Vim and I notice each line has a trailing ^M…. Aargh the dreaded DOS linebreak.

Dusting off my rusty vim-foo I simply do a search and replace using Vim without having to exit the file.

The command is:

:%s/^M//g

Job done, well actually, no, there is still an issue with the script, but now I at least know that ^M is not the culprit.

Note: To get the ^M I did NOT type a caret and M, I typed Ctrl-V then Ctrl-M

Comments

3 responses to “Removing DOS linebreaks from your files using Vim”

  1. Alastair Battrick Avatar
    Alastair Battrick

    You can also run the linux program dos2unix on the file to achieve this

    Reply
  2. Bealers Avatar
    Bealers

    Or dostou sure, but the point was not having to exit the file to run a second utility.

    Reply
  3. David Goodwin Avatar
    David Goodwin

    Hi,

    I’d suggest you make sure you have a ~/.vimrc etc. When using VIM I /never/ see ^M characters (at worst it just says ‘dos’ in the status bar) – unless I’m dealing with a file that has both dos and Unix file endings (e.g. svn conflict file).

    To change the line endings of a file, you can use :set fileformat=unix (or =dos)

    David.
    (p.s. the openid box has the same name as the other field, so when posting this the first time, my browser had ‘kindly’ filled in the openid field with an invalid value, so I ended up loosing the comment 🙂 )

    Reply

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