Remove ^H and ^M characters from a file using Linux shell scripting

Question

How do I remove ^H and ^M characters from a file using Linux shell scripting?

^[[0^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H   rcv-packets: 0
^[[0^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H^H ^H      rcv-errs: 0
     rcv-drop: 0
     rcv-fifo: 0
     rcv-frame: 0

Answer 1

What you're seeing there are control characters, you simply could delete them with tr

cat your_file |
tr -d '\b\r'

this is better:

tr -d '\b\r' < your_file

Answer 2

Two methods come to mind immediately:

• tr -d control+v control+h
• sed 's/control+v control+h//g'

Here's both in action:

$ od -c test
0000000  \b   h   e   l   l   o  \b   t   h   e   r   e  \b  \n
0000016
$ sed 's/^H//g' < test | od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o   t   h   e   r   e  \n
0000013
$ tr -d ^H < test | od -c
0000000   h   e   l   l   o   t   h   e   r   e  \n
0000013