Removing Hidden Windows Charactes From Files

[jominj]

While editing files on a machine running Windows and uploading them to a Linux server is convenient, but this may lead to problems. Windows-based text editors put special characters at the end of lines to denote a line return or newline. Some applications on a Linux server cannot understand these characters and can cause the service to not respond correctly. There is a simple way to correct this problem: dos2unix.

Below is an example from a php.ini file showing what the hidden characters look like:

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;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;^M
; Resource Limits ;^M
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;^M
;^M
max_execution_time = 30^M
max_input_time = 60^M
memory_limit = 32M^M

This will not be appear in windows editors but appear in Linux editors. We can convert this using the command: dos2unix  /path/to/file
For example :

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root@host [~]# dos2unix /usr/local/lib/php.ini
dos2unix: converting file /usr/local/lib/php.ini to UNIX format ...
That's it now the file will not contain any special windows characters.

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;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Resource Limits ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;
max_execution_time = 30
max_input_time = 60
memory_limit = 32M