replacing ^M with emacs

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2006 at 12:26:25PM -0700, Noah wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> It appears that a text editor placed a bunch on ^M throughout a text 
> file I am working with.  I assure this is equivalent to eh keystroke 
> control-M.

This is probably "MS-DOS" type text file.   MS text file lines
all end in a CR-LF character pair whereas UNIX text file lines
have only a LF (line feed) and the end of each line.
All text editors on MS systems do that and if you do a binary transfer
of a file from MS to UNIX you will get all the extra ^M characters
showing up.   most versions of ftp have an ASCII mode that will
do the conversion for you as you transfer the file back and forth
between MS and UNIX.   I think SCP only does binary transfers.

I am not an Emacs user, but,
You can easily use tr(1) to remove all the ^M characters from a 
file.    tr -r "\r" <badfile >goodfile
where badfile is the one with the ^M characters and goodfile is
the newly cleaned copy.   The only anoying thing is having to 
write to a second file and then get rid of the first or mv the 
new one back to the old (as in:   mv goodfile badfile   after doing
the tr.

////jerry

> 
> How might I get emacs to search replace
> 
> also is there a mail list focused specifically on emacs usability?  
> please refer me to it?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Noah
> 
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