UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Despite what bufoonix wrote, you can do what you are trying to do... To do it right, however, you must replace the \015 character with another character, such as a space (\020).

The thing is, you really don't want to replace all instances of \015, because that might represent code or some piece of instruction, initialization data, etc. You have to be more selective. Try something like this (and test it !!)

Code:

perl -p -i -e 's/\015(\012)/ $1/gs' *

At least this way you get \015s coupled before a newline. The problem is trickier, however, since in some compilers, something like, "strchr(string, crnl)", the "crnl" is actually "\r\n" and the strchr library handles that as a special case. I'm not sure what will happen if you substitute a space-newline in there!

I can imagine other sorts of headaches you might encounter.

Hi.
I suspect that because the OP began at /, there were also executables that were changed.

A filter to eliminate non-text items would be the first step I would suggest. The command file makes good guesses about the content of files, but it varies among systems, so one would need to do a few experiments first.

Running commands and scripts with an echo in front of the command that will do the real work is often a good idea. One then can see what will get changed, and the process can be fine-turned until it meets the requirements.

This was a good learning experience -- tough, but good -- and I think many of us have had that happen at least once. It underlines the usefulness of backups. Currently I do a lot of work in virtual machines, and the snapshot is very easy, not dissimilar to what buffoonix outlined for LVM volumes. I do that for almost every update that is made available. There was a number of weeks when GNU/Debian testing updates made a mess of fonts and the desktop. I did snapshots and restored until they got it straightened out ... cheers, drl

Thanks for all your replies .

Just to mention, Ctrl V and then Ctrl M was used to replace the characters in the executed command which changed most of my jar and lib files.

My Sysadmin can backup the filesystem using /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/bp command

Is it better to replace just the libraries that were changed on that mountpoint (they are too many including the ./java/jre/lib ) or the entire mountpoint since my vignette application is "installed" on Solaris at /apps dir , would replacing the entire /appl directory be sensible ?

Another observation - No binary files were changed - signifying they dont have any such control chars.

Restore as much as you can and start over, would be my advice.