Moving files from Windows to UNIX or Linux (and now MacOSX) can be a pain if during the process you end up with a text file full of EOL characters thanks to how Microsoft terminates lines of text in Windows.  Yep, that’s the little ^M at the end of every line.  Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can’t help but get stuck with them.

Here’s a tip for getting rid of them once and for all.  Use the dos2unix command!  Just like it sounds, it converts text files riddled with ^M’s to nice pretty *nix happy files.

By default, the command will open and read your file, and write it back to it’s original name and location.  Minus the ^M beasties.  So you can simply do this to convert a file:

dos2unix filename

Yes, it’s that easy.  There are other options if you want to get fancy, read the man page it’s full of information.  Do a quick Google search and you’ll find lots of resources about it, but chances are it’s already part of your Linux distro.  Other operating systems may be different.  Have fun!