Windows files and Unix files (Redhat, Ubuntu, etc) are encoded in different ways. Namely, the end of line that is a part of most files created in Windows is not compatible with Unix. You can usually see this because there is a ‘weird character’ at the end of each line. ‘cat’ does not show it, but ‘cat -e’ will show these characters: xx.xx.125.240 spc240.xx.xx^M$ xx.xx.125.241 spc241.xx.xx^M$ The ^M is a Windows ‘End of Line’ character. Fortunately there is an easy way to fix these for using them in a unix based system. Install ‘dos2unix’, and then run the file through them: dos2unix filename You can even run these on a bunch of files: [root@ns1 ~]# dos2unix RDNS-* dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.81 to UNIX format … dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.82 to UNIX format … dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.85 to UNIX format … dos2unix: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.95 to UNIX format … dos2unix:….

Categories: Linux,Shell,System Administration,Windows

Tagged: character encoding, dos2unix, end of line, recode