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Suppose you are working on a very old unix server where dos2unix, perl, tr, and sed are not present. How can you convert files from dos to unix format?

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sed is allowed? – elmarco Aug 12 '10 at 15:11
@elmarco: no :( – Hemant Aug 12 '10 at 15:20
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How old does a unix server have to be to not have tr and sed ? sed is old........ iirc, – xenoterracide♦ Nov 7 '10 at 23:25
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Would ex or ed be available on a system like that? I would'nt call it unix if there is no tr or sed. – MattBianco Mar 31 '11 at 6:52
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No sed? Really!? Out of interest, what is the system? As Gilles and MattBianco point out, it would probably still have ed at least. – Mikel Mar 31 '11 at 21:03
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2 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

I think you are referring to removing the caret-M at the end of lines. You can use search and replace in vi to do this.

In vi I normally do: (where "^" represents CTRL):

:%s/^V^M//g

Which shows on the screen as:

:%s/^M//g
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thanks that worked :). I think its a very portable solution. – Hemant Aug 12 '10 at 16:06
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You can also use sed to do the same thing w/out having to vim the file: sed -e '%s/^V^M//g' filename That also will show on the screen as sed e '%s/^M//g' filename In general, if you can search/replace it in vim, the command is virtually the same in sed. – gabe. Aug 12 '10 at 19:09
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@gabe: the sed solution is actually even more portable +1 :) – wzzrd Aug 12 '10 at 20:54
up vote 5 down vote

A server without tr or sed would have to be really old, or missing some basic commands. Hopefully ed is there; it existed in Unix first edition.

ed /path/to/file
1,$s/^V^M$//
w
q

where ^V^M means typing Ctrl+V then Ctrl+M (to enter a literal line feed). If you know that all lines do end in CR LF, you can use 1,$s/.$// instead (indiscriminately remove the last character on each line).

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