How do you search for files containing DOS line endings (CRLF) with grep on Linux?

Tim_Abell_10245 0
Viewed 110696

I want to search for files containing DOS line endings with grep on Linux. Something like this:

grep -IUr --color '\r\n' .

The above seems to match for literal rn which is not what is desired.

The output of this will be piped through xargs into todos to convert crlf to lf like this

grep -IUrl --color '^M' . | xargs -ifile fromdos 'file'
newline grep linux bash
9 Answers

grep probably isn't the tool you want for this. It will print a line for every matching line in every file. Unless you want to, say, run todos 10 times on a 10 line file, grep isn't the best way to go about it. Using find to run file on every file in the tree then grepping through that for "CRLF" will get you one line of output for each file which has dos style line endings:

find . -not -type d -exec file "{}" ";" | grep CRLF

will get you something like:

./1/dos1.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
./2/dos2.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
./dos.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
Thomee_128250

Use Ctrl+V, Ctrl+M to enter a literal Carriage Return character into your grep string. So:

grep -IUr --color "^M"

will work - if the ^M there is a literal CR that you input as I suggested.

If you want the list of files, you want to add the -l option as well.

Explanation

  • -I ignore binary files
  • -U prevents grep from stripping CR characters. By default it does this it if it decides it's a text file.
  • -r read all files under each directory recursively.
user_80020

If your version of grep supports -P (--perl-regexp) option, then

grep -lUP '\r$'

could be used.

Linulin_124810

dos2unix has a file information option which can be used to show the files that would be converted:

dos2unix -ic /path/to/file

To do that recursively you can use bash’s globstar option, which for the current shell is enabled with shopt -s globstar:

dos2unix -ic **      # all files recursively
dos2unix -ic **/file # files called “file” recursively

Alternatively you can use find for that:

find -type f -exec dos2unix -ic {} +            # all files recursively (ignoring directories)
find -name file -exec dos2unix -ic {} + # files called “file” recursively
user_61647120

You can use file command in unix. It gives you the character encoding of the file along with line terminators.

$ file myfile
myfile: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF line terminators
$ file myfile | grep -ow CRLF
CRLF
user_59433850
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