Find control m characters and remove it

Question

Is there is any single line command to recursively find the .ctl file in all the directories and remove the control m characters from it?

Answer 1

Use find with sed.

With GNU sed:

find . -name "*ctl" -type f -exec sed -i 's,^M,,' "{}" \;

With BSD sed:

find . -name "*ctl" -type f -exec sed -i '' -e 's,^M,,' "{}" \;

^M in sed argument is a literal Control-M, not ASCII ^ followed M. Press Control-v and then M to enter it.

Answer 2

dos2unix was born to solve this problem.

You can locate all the target files by find or whatever program, then

dos2unix filename

Background of this problem (by Dominique )

Let's explain what this is about: in UNIX, ENTER is translated as chr(13) (ASCII-code of carriage return), in DOS (Windows) ENTER is translated as chr(13)+chr(10) (carriage return combined with newline character). When you open a Windows textfile in UNIX, you see that chr(10) character (which you don't want). The mentioned dos2unix command searches for that chr(13)+chr(10) and removes the chr(10) characters. – Dominique