Re: How do I reference carriage returns?

[John (Farewell Horizontal!) Mackin <john@physiol.su.oz.au>]

[Just making a guest appearance on the Sam Fans list.]

This is a good question.  The fact is that sam handles control characters
rather well, always excepting null characters, but control-M presents a
particular problem because (at least on UNIX under most conditions)
you can't _type_ it.  If you could type it, you could just deal with
it directly -- try this with characters like control-A, control-G, et al.
They work great, inserting themselves when typed, and functioning correctly
inside commands.  (You may have problems _displaying_ these characters,
since they come down to the font you are using, presumably under X --
try to use a font which displays control characters somehow.)

To return to control-M, though, you can't deal with it since there is no
way to type it.  This isn't too bad, usually, since in the typical case
the file you want to fix up has a control-M as the last character of
_every_ line, and so the trivial

	,x/.$/d

deals with it very effectively.  If you aren't convinced that every line
ends with control-M, then yes, old faithful tr is the best solution.

OK,
John.