remove CR line terminators

Question

Firstly I would say that I have read this post however I still have problems for the CR line terminators.

There is a file called build_test.sh, I edited in leafpad and it can be displayed right in Vim:

cp ~/moonbox/llvm-2.9/lib/Transforms/MY_TOOL/$1 test.cpp 
cd ~/moonbox/llvm-obj/tools/TEST_TOOL/
make
make install
cd -

However:

1. Using cat build_test.sh it outputs nothing.
2. Using more build_test.sh it outputs:cd - install/llvm-obj/tools/TEST_TOOL/Y_TOOL/$1 test.cpp
3. Using less build_test.sh it outputs: cp ~/moonbox/llvm-2.9/lib/Transforms/MY_TOOL/$1 test.cpp^Mcd ~/moonbox/llvm-obj/tools/TEST_TOOL/^Mmake^Mmake install^Mcd -

The result of file build_test.sh is:

build_test.sh: ASCII text, with CR line terminators

Following this post, the ^M no longer exists however there is no more line break :-(
The result of file build_test_no_cr.sh is now:

build_test_nocr.sh: ASCII text, with no line terminators

The solution can be seen here.

However I still would like why cat displays nothing and more displays so odd result. In addition why dos2unix and set fileformat=unix in Vim fails for this case.

ps: I guess that maybe my editor(Vim or leafpad?) generates only \r rather \n for the newline. How can it be so?

Answer 1

Simple \r terminators for newlines are "old Mac" line terminators, it is strange that an editor in 2012+ even generates files with such line terminators... Anyway, you can use the mac2unix command, which is part of the dos2unix distribution:

# Edits thefile inline
mac2unix thefile
# Takes origfile as an input, outputs to dstfile
mac2unix -n origfile dstfile

This command will not munge files which have already expected line terminators, which is a bonus. And the reverse (unix2mac) also exists.

Note that mac2unix is the same as dos2unix -c mac.