Autarchy of the Private Cave

Tiny bits of bioinformatics, [web-]programming etc

    • Archives

    • Recent comments

    Linux: how to remove trailing ^M (carriage return)

    30th March 2009

    Imagine you have some styles.css transferred from Win machine to Linux via FTP in binary mode instead of ASCII mode; then

    cat styles.css | tr -d "\r" > styles-nocarriage.css

    will create styles-nocarriage.css with ^M’s removed.

    Alternative syntax:

    tr -d "\r" < styles.css > styles-nocarriage.css

    Most editors have global replace features which allow to get rid of control characters using regular expressions (exact instructions are editor-specific).

    For multiple files, try this:

    for f
    do
    mv $f ${f}~ && tr -d "\r" <${f}~ >$f
    rm ${f}~
    done

    Save this shell script as a file (e.g. dos2unix.sh), then do ./dos2unix.sh . This script accepts wildcards (e.g. ./dos2unix.sh *.php), so be careful!

    Share

    Posted in *nix, how-to, Notepad | 3 Comments »

    Git: how to remove file and commit from history

    13th February 2009

    Once I accidentally added circa 300 MiB of archive files to one of my git repositories (which was as small as 5 MiB). I removed those files as soon as I noticed them, but the .git directory still preserved commits with those files, and still occupied over 300 MiB.

    I have found the solution at stackoverflow (see also this question).

    This method worked for me, but I couldn’t push my rebased repository to the gitosis. I would need to re-init the gitosis repository from my rebased, but I’m not yet prepared to do that.

    There is also a slightly different method (which relies on a temporary tag instead of a temporary branch), documented in Git online manual pages; I prefer the temporary branch method.

    Below is a full copy-paste of the winning answer by Charles Bailey:

    # create and check out a temporary branch at the location of the bad merge
    git checkout -b tmpfix

    # remove the incorrectly added file
    git rm somefile.orig

    # commit the amended merge
    git commit –amend

    # go back to the master branch
    git checkout master

    # replant the master branch onto the corrected merge
    git rebase tmpfix

    # delete the temporary branch
    git branch -d tmpfix

    Also, in my case this thread at stackoverflow was highly useful. I start enjoying the concise and compact style of Charles Bailey :) :
    Read the rest of this entry »

    Share

    Posted in how-to, Links, Programming | 2 Comments »