September 16, 2003
VI Tip

In vi, you may search for control characters by typing /^[xxx] where ^ means [ctrl-v] and xxx is an ascii code. Useful for matching line-endings (a nice shortcut is /^[enter]). Mac files look like one long line in vi, but if you have vim just add a set fileformats=unix,mac,dos to your .vimrc and vim will behave nicely.

To batch convert line endings in the shell:
tr "\r" "\n" < mac.txt > unix.txt
Or to get grep to actually work in Mac files:
tr "\r" "\n" < mac.txt | grep 'text'.

Posted by dirkpitt2050 on September 16, 2003 12:05 PM