Hi
I have a script that reads from a text file and in the script I have conditional statements. The script works if I create a text file from scratch, but for some reason, my conditional statements do not work if my text file comes from a zip file.
ie: I use the command: unzip myfolder/myfile.zip -d myfolder
and then I read the text file that comes from the zip.
I have no idea what's going on. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Chris

Hi

My colleague determined that I had ^M at the end of each line in the text file that I extracted. Why is it that the ^M character does not show up when I cat the file?

I now need to find a way to remove the ^M's from my file. I believe I saw something in the forums about this.

Thanks

Control characters do not generally have displayable graphics associated with them. They are not for display, but for control purposes. The cat command simply writes the data to stdout, and what happens happens. For example, if it writes a line to the screen that contains a tab (this is also a control character), the tab "character" is not displayed, but the output device reacts to it by advancing to the next predefined tab position.

But the vi editor needs to be more helpful because we are making changes to the data and we need to know each character that is present, including the control characters. So vi displays a ^M on the screen for a Ctrl-M character. And you can tell that it is in fact a single control character because you will advance across it in a single keystroke (whereas it would take you two keystrokes to advance across two actual characters ^M.

Strip these with:

sed 's/^M//' textfile > textfile.new

And you have to enter the ^M by typing Ctrl-V followed by Ctrl-M.

Jim has done a good job of describing the control-m issue. However, embedding ^M in a script isn't very portable. This script also removes ^M:

tr -d '\015\032' < file > newfile

or

sed 's/'"$(printf '\015')"'$//
s/'"$(printf '\032')"'$//'file > newfile

The other character - 032 is the DOS EOF.

Regards,

Nails