Remove ^M characters at end of lines in vi

Last Updated on May 20, 2011

UNIX treats the end of line differently than other operating systems. Sometimes when editing files in both Windows and UNIX environments, a CTRL-M character is visibly displayed at the end of each line as ^M in vi.

To remove the ^M characters at the end of all lines in vi, use:

:%s/^V^M//g

The ^v is a CONTROL-V character and ^m is a CONTROL-M. When you type this, it will look like this:

:%s/^M//g

In UNIX, you can escape a control character by preceeding it with a CONTROL-V. The :%s is a basic search and replace command in vi. It tells vi to replace the regular expression between the first and second slashes (^M) with the text between the second and third slashes (nothing in this case). The g at the end directs vi to search and replace globally (all occurrences).