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From: psamuels@hmc.edu (Peter Samuelson)
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art,rec.arts.ascii
Subject: Talk: Uploading and Trailing CRs
Date: 11 Jan 1995 18:02:36 -0600
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Daniel Au speaking:
> Does anyone else have problems with such as the one below...I assume
> that the person uploaded a file and got all the trailing M's, which I
> know occurs with any text file because it happens to me too.

It's a consequence of an old argument about text file format.  MS-DOS
machines end lines with character 13 (CR) then character 10 (LF); UNIX
ends lines with only the LF, and other operating systems take sides.

The workstation I'm on has a program, dos2unix, that strips the
extraneous ^M's out of a text file, but if you don't have something of
that name (I think it's a Sun thing) you can use the command

  sed 's/[^ -~]$//' < filename > newfilename

(in UNIX) to do the same thing (translate DOS text from {filename} into
{newfilename}).  It would also filter out other control codes,
including such nice things as HT, BEL and ESC, but only if they
occurred at the end of a line, which they wouldn't be likely to, so
it's pretty safe.  In any case, it's the best I can do.

Peter