Remove ^M character from log files

Converting a standalone file

If you run the following command:

$ dos2unix <file>

The <file> will have all the ^M characters stripped. If you want to leave <file> intact, then simply run dos2unix like this:

$ dos2unix -n <file> <newfile>

Parsing output from a command

If you need to do them as part of a chain of commands via a pipe, you can use any number of tools such as tr, sed, awk, or perl to do this.

tr

$ java -jar test.jar | tr -d '^M' >> test.log

sed

$ java -jar test.jar | sed 's/^M//g' >> test.log

awk

$ java -jar test.jar | awk 'sub(/^M/,"")' >> test.log

perl

$ java -jar test.jar | perl -p -e 's/^M//g' >> test.log

Typing ^M

When entering the ^M be sure to enter it in one of the following ways:

1. As Control + v + M and not Shift + 6 + M.
2. As a backslash r, i.e. (\r).
3. As an octal number (\015).
4. As a hexidecimal number (\x0D).

Why is this necessary?

The ^M is part of how end of lines are terminated on the Windows platform. Each end of line is terminated with a carriage return character followed by a linefeed character.

On Unix systems the end of line is terminated by just a linefeed character.

• linefeed character = 0x0A in hex, also written as \n.
• carriage return character = 0x0D in hex, also written as \r.

Examples

You can see these if you pipe the output to a tool such as od or hexdump. Here's a sample file with the line terminating carriage returns + linefeed characters.

$ cat sample.txt
hi there
bye there

You can see them with hexdump as \r + \n:

$ hexdump -c sample.txt 
0000000   h   i       t   h   e   r   e  \r  \n   b   y   e       t   h
0000010   e   r   e  \r  \n                                            
0000015

Or as their hexidecimal 0d + 0a:

$ hexdump -C sample.txt 
00000000  68 69 20 74 68 65 72 65  0d 0a 62 79 65 20 74 68  |hi there..bye th|
00000010  65 72 65 0d 0a                                    |ere..|
00000015

Running this through sed 's/\r//g':

$ sed 's/\r//g' sample.txt |hexdump -C
00000000  68 69 20 74 68 65 72 65  0a 62 79 65 20 74 68 65  |hi there.bye the|
00000010  72 65 0a                                          |re.|
00000013

You can see that sed has removed the 0d character.

Viewing files with ^M without converting?

Yes you can use vim to do this. You can either set the fileformat setting in vim, which will have the effect of converting the file like we were doing above, or you can change the fileformat in the vim view.

changing a file's format

:set fileformat=dos
:set fileformat=unix

You can use the shorthand notation too:

:set ff=dos
:set ff=unix

Alternatively you can just change the fileformat of the view. This approach is nondestructive:

:e ++ff=dos
:e ++ff=unix

Here you can see me opening our ^M file, sample.txt in vim:

           

Now I'm converting the fileformat in the view:

           

Here's what it looks like when converted to the unix fileformat:

           

References

• Different ways to delete ^M character in a file
• Wikipedia Newline article

Shove the file through dos2unix to fix the line endings.

Or, use one of these:

sed 's,\r$,,'
tr -d '\r'