Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I am trying to write a shell script to help with some digital signature work currently being undertaken where we have a file that contains a number of rows ending with ^M.

What I need to do is concatenate this using shell scripting and retain the control character. E.G.

Code:

abc^M
def^M
ghi^M

becomes

Code:

abc^Mdef^Mghi^M

I have a file called afile.txt

with contents

Code:

abc^M
def^M
ghi^M

And a script that looks like

Code:

for line in `cat afile.txt`
do
line2=${line2}${line}
done
    echo $line2

This returns:

Code:

ghi

So where am I going wrong? Any help gratefully appreciated.

Thanks.

P.S.

If I remove the ^M from each line it works, but I need to keep ^M in the string.