Convert Windows or DOS Encoded Files to Unix/Linux. (ANSI to UTF-8)

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: converting file RDNS-xx.xx.100 to UNIX format …

‘cat -e’ will show that these files are fixed.

You can also use the program ‘recode’.

Join