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1

While editing a unix file I'm getting data as below in vi editor.

MGW:^FVMG107
MGW:^FVMG113
MGW:^FVMG108
MGW:^FVMG103

where in above data ^F is not viewable in cat command. I have tried dos2unix & sed also, but it still exists. How can I remove ^F

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3 Answers

up vote 12 down vote

^F is the way vim is tellying you there is a (non-printable) character 0x06 there (F is the sixth letter of the alphabet, they range: '^@', '^A', '^B'... '^Y', '^Z'. '^[', '^\', '^]', '^^', '^_')

I had no problem removing it graphically in vim, nano, joe… but if you prefer a command line approach, knowing that it's the character 0x06, you can use sed -i 's/\x06//g' filename to remove it.

PS: I'm afraid polym solution of removing ^F on cat -v will only work if your file doesn't have any other unprintable characters, which would get mangled.

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Thanks, I modified my solution :). Nice eye! –  polym 7 hours ago
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up vote 2 down vote

Edit: As Angel mentioned, you shouldn't use this solution, since it might produce undesirable changes.

His solution (hex(^F)==\x06):

sed -i 's/\x06//g' filename

My (inproper) solution:

cat -v oldfile | sed 's/\^F//g' > newfile

should do it.

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As Ángel says below, this will potentially make other undesirable changes to the contents of the file - it's not a very general answer to the question. –  godlygeek 10 hours ago
    
In addition to Ángel’s comment (referring to the functionality of cat -v), this will also cause corruption if the file happens to have any ^ characters that are immediately followed by F characters. –  Scott 8 hours ago
    
@godlygeek and Scott thanks for the info :)! –  polym 7 hours ago
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up vote 1 down vote

As Ángel says, ^F in vi or the output of cat -v denotes an 06 character.  Another way of getting rid of these characters is

tr -d "\06" < oldfile > newfile
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