I have a long file originally created with vi but at some point saved with MS Word. At another time I substituted all occurrences of ^M with XXX. Now I'd like to get this back to vi but with the XXX converted to newline.

I'm using whatever version of vim Apple employs.

Thanks,

Gale

You can try something like this:

Regards

Thanks, I've been trying to do this in vi with:

:%s/XXX/^M/g

and all I get are the ^Ms when I wanted a carriage return.

BTW I know to use ctrl-v before the M.

In this awk line won't "" just remove each occurrence of XXX?

It removes one occurrence in a line, I suppose you have one occurrence of XXX at the end of the line?
I'm not shure I understand what you're trying to achieve. Do you want to convert the file to dos/windows format?

Regards

I thought my original message was clear.

This is one long file in a single line. Wherever XXX appears I need a carriage return or newline so the file can be read and edited with vi.

So I'm not just trying to get rid of XXX, I'm trying to REPLACE them with a carriage return.

I originally screwed up this file after it had been saved in MS Word and of course there was a ^M everywhere.

I used the substitute command in vi to get rid of those ^Ms but still didn't achieve the result I wanted. Then I substituted XXX for ^M with:

:%s/^M/XXX/g

If you still have the original file with a ^M after each line you can remove them with:

Regards