actually: no. The "$" is just signifying the line end.

The problem you are obviously encountering is the old DOS<->UNIX problem:

in DOS lines are separated by the <CR><LF>-character sequence. That is, if you see a file (in DOS/Windows) like:

Code:

AB
CD

This file has in fact 6 bytes: "<A><B><CR><LF><C><D>". CR (Carriage Return) and LF (Line Feed) were originally printer-steering characters and this way DOS did circumvent the necessity to implement a printing program which (in professional OSes) entered these control sequences. Instead in DOS "printing" meant just dumping the file at it was to the printer device.

In Unix the situation was different and indeed it had such a printing system. Therefore it was not necessary to have a two-character sequence to separate lines and hence UNIX systems have only a single character "NL" (new line) to separate lines. Incidentally it is the same character as the "LF" in DOS, which is why you see the additional "^M" character at the end of the line. These are simply the second of the CR-LF pair. The file above in UNIX would consist also of 6 characters, but only because proper UNIX files have <EOF> (End Of File) character at their end:"<A><B><NL><C><D><EOF>".

Your problem comes most probably from transferring files back and forth between DOS- (or Windows-) systems and UNIX-systems without properly translating between them. ftp, for instance, has two modes: A(scii) and BI(nary): binary means no such translation takes place. ASCII means the ftp client becomes aware on which system it runs and to which system it transfers files and translates these line endings to what is proper on the target system. Alas, some email clients base their automatic detection on file-names (like "*.txt", etc.) and many users (you, obviously, included) don't know how and/or when to set the correct mode. This is why these ill-formed files happen.

You can either remove the superfluous line-ending characters in UNIX via the givem sed-script (you have to do that PRIOR to all the other scripts) or you can use the dos2unix and unix2dos utilities (which do the same, just in a "prepackaged" way) or you can use (on some systems) the recode-command, which also does the same.

I hope this helps.

bakunin