stripping last character from end of each line

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1

Hi, sorry for being dumb but I have a file with a variable amount of records (day to day it differs) but is fixed at 80 characters wide. Unfortunately the 80th and last charachter in each line is a "^M" carriage return character which i want to get rid of. Is there a really easy command that i can use to strip this character off the end of each line (as i say the number of lines is totally variable)

any help would be greatly appreciated
Gary

2

The command you want is called "dos2unix" although depending on your system may be called "dos2ux" or "dos2aix" etc.

3

Are there no other ways to do this besides installing a program, I need something as well at the Unix end shell script wise

4

You could use sed, something like:-

sed 's/^M$//' file.txt > newfile.txt (Ctrl-v, then enter for ^M character)

or if the record-length's always going to be invariable, you could use cut.

5

Simple and effective:

strings filename > filename.new; mv filename.new filename
6

thanks for that, I tried it this morning and it's just the job...many thanks to all....

7

you may use the sed to work it out.here is an example.

echo "which is"|sed -e 's/[a-z]$//g'

this will take out the last character.

thanks.