UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

The reason was Windows.

With the ^M's gone, the script from vgersh99 (and from Corona688) work just fine.

Windows is descended from DOS, which needed two characters to do a newline: A newline character, \n, which moves the printer down one line, and a carriage return, \r, which moves it to the beginning of the line. Lines in Windows look like "this is a line of text\r\n"

UNIX doesn't need a carriage return and considers it part of the string instead, reading in "this is a line of text\r\n" as one line and chopping off the \n but leaving the \r. So when you paste them together you get: 1\r,x\r,m\r\n
Now follow what happens when this gets printed into a terminal... It prints 1, then the \r moves it to the beginning of the line but not down a line, then it overwrites it with ",x", moves to the beginning of the line again, overwrites with ",m", moves to the beginning of the line again, then moves down one line.

Use a proper editor inside your emulator, you'll save yourself a lot of headaches. Better yet, use an actual UNIX or Linux system instead of an imitation.

thanks for the clarification i appreciate it