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I want to delete all the control characters from my file using linux bash commands.

There are some control characters like EOF (0x1A) especially which are causing the problem when I load my file in another software. I want to delete this.

Here is what I have tried so far:

this will list all the control characters:

cat -v -e -t file.txt | head -n 10

^D ^_$

This will list all the control characters using grep:

$ cat file.txt | head -n 10 | grep '[[:cntrl:]]'


matches the above output of cat command.

Now, I ran the following command to show all lines not containing control characters but it is still showing the same output as above (lines with control characters)

$ cat file.txt | head -n 10 | grep '[^[:cntrl:]]'


here is the output in hex format:

$ cat file.txt | head -n 10 | grep '[[:cntrl:]]' | od -t x2
0000000 2b01 0a18 3101 0a18 2004 0a1f 2d05 0a04
0000020 2d05 0a13 3105 0a16 2506 0a1f 2d06 0a04
0000040 2e06 0a1f 2f06 0a1f

as you can see, the hex values, 0x01, 0x18 are control characters.

I tried using the tr command to delete the control characters but got an error:

$ cat file.txt | tr -d "\r\n" "[:cntrl:]" >> test.txt
tr: extra operand `[:cntrl:]'
Only one string may be given when deleting without squeezing repeats.
Try `tr --help' for more information.

If I delete all control characters, I will end up deleting the newline and carriage return as well which is used as the newline characters on windows. How do I delete all the control characters keeping only the ones required like "\r\n"?


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grep would grep lines of output unless you are using the -o option. –  devnull Mar 9 at 12:41
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1 Answer

Instead of using the predefined [:cntrl:] set, which as you observed includes \n and \r, just list (in octal) the control characters you want to get rid of:

$ tr -d '\000-\011\013\014\016-\037' < file.txt > newfile.txt
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