Replace \n with \r\n in Unix file

Question

I'm trying to do the opposite of this question, replacing Unix line endings with Windows line endings, so that I can use SQL Server bcp over samba to import the file. I have sed installed but not dos2unix. I tried reversing the examples but to no avail.

Here's the command I'm using.

sed -e 's/\n/\r\n/g' myfile

I executed this and then ran od -c myfile, expecting to see \r\n where there used to be \n. But there all still \n. (Or at least they appear to be. The output of od overflows my screen buffer, so I don't get to see the beginning of the file).

I haven't been able to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

When faced with this, I use a simple perl one-liner:

perl -pi -e 's/\n/\r\n/' filename

because sed behavior varies, and I know this works.

Answer 2

• What is the problem with getting dos2unix onto the machine?
• What is the platform you are working with?
• Do you have GNU sed or regular non-GNU sed?

On Solaris, /usr/bin/sed requires:

sed 's/$/^M/'

where I entered the '^M' by typing controlV controlM. The '$' matches at the end of the line, and replaces the end of line with the control-M. You can script that, too.

Mechanisms expecting sed to expand '\r' or '\\r' to control-M are going to be platform-specific, at best.

Answer 3

You don't need the -e option.

$ matches the endline character. This sed command will insert a \r character before the end of line:

sed 's/$/\r/' myfile 

Answer 4

Just adding a \r (aka ^M, see Jonathan Leffler's answer) in front of \n is not safe because the file might have mixed mode EOL, so then you risk ending up with some lines becomming \r\r\n. The safe thing to do is first remove all '\r' characters, and then insert (a single) \r before \n.

#!/bin/sh
sed 's/^M//g' ${1+"$@"} | sed 's/$/^M/'

Updated to use ^M.

Answer 5

 sed 's/\([^^M]\)$/\0^M/' your_file

This makes sure you only insert a \r when there is no \r before \n. This worked for me.