UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear Members,

We have a file which contains some special characters. I need to replace these special character by a new line character(\n).

The Special character is \x85.

I am not sure what this character means and how we can remove it.

Any inputs are greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Sandeep

(Post withdrawn)

Thanks for your reply.

I tried using your commands but it replaces the special character with a $ sign instead of new line character.

After this i again tried to replace $ with a newline character, then it replaces $ with some special symbol again.

Not sure what i am doing wrong.

Oops.

Try this - it should work this time.

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
X85=`echo "\0205\c"`
cat filename | tr "${X85}" "\n"

X85 = octal 205

Thanks Methyl,

Its adding new line characters now.

I am very new to UNIX, so what exactly are you doing here.

I guess you are converting from hexadecimal to octal and searching for that octal character.

Correct me if i am wrong.

Thanks

I have a confession. I used the M$ Windows "calc" program to convert from hex to octal. We could of course have used unix "bc".

I've called the environment variable "X85" . It's just a name.

The special syntax to "echo" just allows you to generate any character from its octal representation. The "\c" at the end of the string stops "echo" adding a newline.

The translate program "tr" used in this way translates all occurances of one character to another character. Program "tr" and many others use "\n" to represent a newline.