Greetings to all,

I have this problem comparing two file and extract the output from it.

"input.txt" file(Extracted from excel):
ABC
ABB
ABA

"compare.txt" file(Extracted from excel):
ABA 1
ABB 2
ABC 3
ABD 4
ABE 5
ABF 6
ABG 7

I would like to get output of
ABC 3
ABB 2
ABA 1

This is my script:
-----------------
while read record
do
grep "$record" compare.txt
done < input.txt > output.txt

The result of `wc -l output.txt` is zero.

I later `echo "try" > input.txt
and when I `vi input.txt` I found this:

ABC^M
ABB^M
ABA^M
try

Question:
Why is the ^M appearing and how to get rid of it?

I tried removing the ^M manually and my output is all NICE.

Please advice.

Thank you.

cheers,
-NoeL-

The ^M appears in files that come over from Windows or DOS. This is because the line ending character in Unix is "\n", while in Windows and DOS, you have "\r\n". The "\n" from these is shown as the ^M.

For a nice explaination go here.

To get rid of these characters, you can use the dos2unix (Solaris) or dos2ux (HP) commands. Or these little perl statements:

# neither of the following perl statements have been tested by me
perl -pe 's/\015\012/\n/g' ##- dos to unix -- just pipe through it
perl -pe 's/\n/\015\012/g' ##- unix to dos -- just pipe through it

strings file_to_convert > converted_file; mv converted_file file_to_convert

Thanks blowtorch.

It works like charm.

cheers,
-NoeL-