How to convert Windows end of line in Unix end of line (CR/LF to LF)

Question

I'm a Java developer and I'm using Ubuntu to develop. The project was created in Windows with Eclipse and it's using the Windows-1252 encoding.

To convert to UTF-8 I've used the recode program:

find Web -iname \*.java | xargs recode CP1252...UTF-8 

This command gives this error:

recode: Web/src/br/cits/projeto/geral/presentation/GravacaoMessageHelper.java failed: Ambiguous output in step `CR-LF..data 

I've searched about it and get the solution in Bash and Windows, Recode: Ambiguous output in step `data..CR-LF' and it says:

Convert line endings from CR/LF to a single LF: Edit the file with Vim, give the command :set ff=unix and save the file. Recode now should run without errors.

Nice, but I've many files to remove the CR/LF character from, and I can't open each to do it. Vi doesn't provide any option to command line for Bash operations.

Can sed be used to do this? How?

Answer 1

There should be a program called dos2unix that will fix line endings for you. If it's not already on your Linux box, it should be available via the package manager.

Answer 2

sed cannot match \n because the trailing newline is removed before the line is put into the pattern space, but it can match \r, so you can convert \r\n (DOS) to \n (Unix) by removing \r:

sed -i 's/\r//g' file 

Warning: this will change the original file

However, you cannot change from Unix EOL to DOS or old Mac (\r) by this. More readings here:

How can I replace a newline (\n) using sed?