Shell Programming and Scripting

The ^M characters are carriage returns, which means this file is in Windows/DOS format, which uses Carriage Return and Line Feed characters at the end of each line. Unix and Unix-like operating systems just use Line Feed. My original solution was removing the Line Feed only, leaving you with a carriage return, which meant that when you catted the file it was returning to the beginning of the line at each CR and overwriting the previous line's text on your terminal.

Do VCF files need to be in DOS format? If so, use the following to only remove the ones as you originally described:

Code:

perl -pi.bak -e 'BEGIN { $/=""; } s/\r\n //g;' *.vcf

Otherwise, if you want to convert the files to Unix format in the process, add an extra search and replace to remove the CRs:

Code:

perl -pi.bak -e 'BEGIN { $/=""; } s/\r//g; s/\n //g;' *.vcf

I also removed the m from the s/// operators since it seems to be unnecessary when you have "slurped" the input data.