Need help with programming issue

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I need a UNIX shellscript command that will remove the 'Paragraph' mark from a simple text file. The Paragraph mark I'm referring to is the special character you can see in a WORD documant (similar to a backwards 'P') when you select the Show Paragraph Marks icon.

If someone can give me the decimal equivalent to the paragraph mark from the ASCII table, that might be enough to make the translation using the TR command.

Thanks.

2

Can you please provide sample input and desired output.

3

See the following:

$ echo hello stranger | od -An -t dC -w10
  104  101  108  108  111   32  115  116  114   97
  110  103  101  114   10

It provides the decimal ASCII translation for any text.
This should help you understand what the special characters are.

4

It looks like my paragraph mark is a decimal 10.

Here is the code from the WORD document:

TRN*2*HRR843137
.9~

The segment should read:

TRN*2*HRR843137.9~

The special character that I want to delete is a line feed (Dec 10 Hex 0A).

I'm trying to remove all line feeds from a text file using this script:

cp $1 temp.txt
tr "\10" "\00" < temp.txt > temp.new
cp temp.new $1
rm temp.txt
rm temp.new

Can someone please provide a script that will do what I need?

Thanks.

5

A dec 10 byte is a simple newline. Nothing special. Are you certain that the special symbol is actually in the file and not an artifact of the program you're using to view the file?

If you want to remove those newlines: tr -d '\n'

To remove a byte using its value, you must use octal values; tr does not support base 10. Read its manual page. It isn't very complicated.

Regards,
Alister

6

And, you're not removing the line feeds but trying replacing them with a null byte, which might lead to other artifacts.

7

I got it to work.

Thanks to all the respondants.

It was actually a Carriage Return/Line Feed that I needed to delete from the file.