remove special characters from a file in linux

Question

I am trying to remove a bunch of ^K from a file in linux for class but everything I have been trying is not working.

so I cat a file memo.txt and it has double spaced lines

I less the file and it has ^K after every line

I am trying to remove the ^K and output it into a new file

I have tried

cat memo.txt | tr -d "\n" > memo.new
cat memo.txt | tr -d "^K" > memo.new

and some other sed functions.

Answer 1

I think ABCD's answer will work. But if it doesn't work, try the following:

tr -d "`echo -e '\013'`" < memo.txt > memo.new

The embedded echo command will output the actual ^K character, so tr will know exactly what to delete.

Answer 2

You might want to try something like this:

tr -d '\013' < memo.txt > memo.new

013 is the octal value for the character ^K.

Answer 3

Have a look at:

man strings

that's imho exactly what you want...