[SOLVED] how to remove "^@" from text files in unix?

Issue

I am trying to remove "^@" from multiple text files using Unix platform. I have already found this solution, but it does not work for my case. I also used sed -i -e 's/^@//g' testfile.txt and dos2unix testfile.txt. sample data are put here.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Solution

The ^@ that you're seeing isn't a literal string. It's an escape code for a NUL (character value 0). If you want to remove them all:

tr -d '\0' <test.txt >newfile.txt

To help diagnose this sort of thing, the od (octal dump) utility is handy. I ran this on the test file you linked, to confirm that they were NULs:

$ od -c test.txt | head
0000000  \0   A  \0   i  \0   r  \0   Q  \0   u  \0   a  \0   l  \0   i
0000020  \0   t  \0   y  \0   S  \0   t  \0   a  \0   t  \0   i  \0   o
0000040  \0   n  \0   E  \0   o  \0   I  \0   C  \0   o  \0   d  \0   e
0000060  \0  \n  \0   D  \0   E  \0   H  \0   E  \0   0  \0   4  \0   4
*
0000400  \0  \n  \0   D  \0   E  \0   H      \0   E  \0   0  \0   4  \0
0000420   4  \0  \n  \0   D  \0   E  \0   H  \0   E  \0   0  \0   4  \0
*
0422160   4  \0  \n  \n
0422164

Answered By - Jim Stewart