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I have a text file containing unwanted null characters (ASCII NUL, \0). When I try to view it in vi I see ^@ symbols, interleaved in normal text. How can I:
Identify which lines in the file contain null characters? I have tried grepping for \0 and \x0, but this did not work.
Remove the null characters? Running strings on the file cleaned it up, but I'm just wondering if this is the best way?
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anywhere in the command line, actually. Actually, I believe it should be tr -d '\000' < file-with-nulls > file-without-nulls since < is part of the shell pipe functionality and not tr . Most shells will recognize & deal with < or > anywhere in the argument string, actually.
What does this command do? Using the -d switch we delete a character. A backslash followed by three 0's represents the null character. This just deletes these characters and writes the result to a new file.
On most modern Unixes, searching for null bytes is most easily done with GNU grep's ' grep -P ' option, which lets you supply a Perl-style regular expression that can include a direct byte value: grep -l -P '\x00' ....
I’d use tr:
tr < file-with-nulls -d '\000' > file-without-nulls If you are wondering if input redirection in the middle of the command arguments works, it does. Most shells will recognize and deal with I/O redirection (<, >, …) anywhere in the command line, actually.
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Use the following sed command for removing the null characters in a file.
sed -i 's/\x0//g' null.txt this solution edits the file in place, important if the file is still being used. passing -i'ext' creates a backup of the original file with 'ext' suffix added.
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