^M at the end of every line in vim

Question

When I am editing source files using vim and other editors sometimes at the end of the line I get these ^M characters at the end of each line. I think that it has something to do with editing a file in windows and then in linux. How can I remove all of these automatically?

Answer 1

There's a program called dos2unix that should strip those for you. Windows uses different line-ending characters which is why that happens.

Answer 2

As a command, type

:%s/^M$//

(To get ^M, press ^V ^M, where ^ is CTRL on most keyboards)

Answer 3

If you're FTPing these files from one box to another make sure to use ASCII transfers.

Answer 4

I tend to run afflicted files through fromdos before reopening them. fromdos is part of the tofrodos package.

Answer 5

You can do this:

:set fileformats=dos

It will hide the ^M's, without touching the file.