That ^M is a line feed, or well the windows version of a line feed. There are several different ways in which to write a line feed and of course to make our lives better *nix, Dos/Windows and Mac all have their own way of writting them.
So Jeff's suggestion relies on a little application that simply finds ad relapces all the dos/windows ways of doing things like line feeds and replaces them with the unix version of the same. If you feel like doing this in perl a simple regex will do the trick, at least for the line feeds, but there is more windows fun to be had, like the way MS Word replaces ceretain characters like " ' - and even ... with a special charatcer because they are estetacly more pleasing to the reader of the document. I am sure there are more examples and dos2unix covers them all. So if it is a single file and only a one of then dos2unix is the easiest way, if you want to do it in perl then you will most likely have to use a regex because not all moachines will have the dos2unix applicaiton available. Regards, Rob Coops On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Remy Guo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > hi all, > i have a text processing script that can work with a file but cannot work > with another file that has the same content. > as i compared the 2 files, i found the file that cannot work has a "^M" at > the end of each line. what is this? is this what made it not work? > by the way, i'm under unix. > thanks.... > > -Remy >
