Hello. I hope this is not a bug, that I'm just doing something wrong.
Anyway, here's how this "journey" started. I had a file with carriage return
characters (^M) in it. The file was one LONG record, and I wanted newline
characters where the ^M's were. I thought I could just set awk's RS variable to ^M,
and that would do it. But, I needed a way to "create"
the ^M character.
Somewhere on the Internet I found this:
cm=`echo m | tr 'm' '\015'`
but, that did not seem to work. Seemed like "cm" ended up being null. To
test if the syntax of the command correct, I did the following:
Script 1 (a file called ASCII):
cat /dev/null > asc
cat /dev/null > asc.txt
for i in 000 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 \
010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 \
020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 \
030 301 032
do
echo "x=\`echo x | tr 'x' '\\${i}'\`" >> asc
echo "echo \"\${x}\" >>asc.txt" >>asc
done
bash asc
The execution of script 1 (ASCII) created a file called asc
(which was executed from within the ASCII file).
asc file:
x=`echo x | tr 'x' '\000'
if [[ "${x}" == "" ]]; then echo "x is null"; else echo "x is not null"; fi
#Note: the above "if" statement was not created by the script. I edited it
in afterwards,
#and re-executed the asc file manually
echo "${x}" >>asc.txt
x=`echo x | tr 'x' '\001'
if [[ "${x}" == "" ]]; then echo "x is null"; else echo "x is not null"; fi
#Same for that "if" statement, too
echo "${x}" >>asc.txt
x=`echo x | tr 'x' '\002'
echo "${x}" >>asc.txt
.
. (several lines left out for brevity)
.
x=`echo x | tr 'x' '\031'
echo "${x}" >>asc.txt
x=`echo x | tr 'x' '\032'
echo "${x}" >>asc.txt
And, the result of that execution was a file, asc.txt
(this is how it looked when viewed with vi):
(a null character, OK, i.e., expected)
^A
^B
^C
^D
^E
^F
^G
^H
(a tab character, OK, i.e., expected)
(a null character, not expected)
^K
^L
(a null character, not expected, at least I had hoped it would be a ^M)
^N
.
.(several lines left out for brevity)
.
^Z
Note 1: where ^I would be is a tab character (OK)
where ^J would be is a null character
where ^M would be is a null character
Note 2: I went back and edited in the following line to the
2nd file (asc):
if [[ "${x}" == "" ]]; then echo "x is null"; else echo "x is not null"; fi
and inserted it after the "000", "001", "012", "013", "015", and "016" lines
to test. The character created by the "012", and "015" lines from the asc
file is null. :(
Note 3: GNU bash, version 2.05.0(8)-release (i686-pc-cygwin)
Note 4: I finally just made a copy of a file that had ^M's in it, edited out
everything but one ^M character, and then edited the following around the ^M:
BEGIN { RS = "^M" }
{ print }
and then used that to process my file with the ^M's in it:
cat ctrl-Ms_file | awk -f RS_is_ctrl-M.awk > newlines_file
Yucky thing is that I would have to keep that "RS_is_crtl-M.awk" file around
(or create it as needed using vi) since I can't create a ^M character "on the
fly". :(
Sincerely,
Richard Lambert
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