How to remove ^[, and all of the escape sequences in a file using linux shell scripting

Question

We want to remove ^[, and all of the escape sequences.

sed is not working and is giving us this error:

$ sed 's/^[//g' oldfile > newfile; mv newfile oldfile; sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command  $ sed -i '' -e 's/^[//g' somefile sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command 

Answer 1

Are you looking for ansifilter?

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Two things you can do: enter the literal escape (in bash:)

Using keyboard entry:

sed 's/Ctrl-vEsc//g'

alternatively

sed 's/Ctrl-vCtrl-[//g'

Or you can use character escapes:

sed 's/\x1b//g' 

or for all control characters:

sed 's/[\x01-\x1F\x7F]//g' # NOTE: zaps TAB character too! 

Answer 2

commandlinefu gives the correct answer which strips ANSI colours as well as movement commands:

sed "s,\x1B\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g"