Unable to remove control @ from file

Question

I have a file which has ^@ in it and I am unable to remove it using sed or replace command in python. I can see ^@ only when I open the file in vi editor. Please suggest. Below is what i tried using sed.

sed 's/^@/?/g' filename

looks like the file is a binary file. ^@ is probably the null character. Good luck processing that with `sed` — Jean-François Fabre, Aug 01 '18 at 08:40
Yeah, i tried all ways using sed and replace to read it but couldn't read. Please suggest other ways which can read it. — ankitpandey, Aug 01 '18 at 08:42

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 01 '18 at 08:53

Tested on Linux, not sure if syntax varies elsewhere, try

$ printf 'abc\0baz\n' | cat -v
abc^@baz
$ printf 'abc\0baz\n' | tr -d '\0' | cat -v
abcbaz

tr will delete all ASCII NUL characters from input.. cat -v is used here to highlight non-printing characters

for file input, use tr -d '\0' <filename

GNU sed (and possibly few other implementations) allow to use hex value to represent a character

$ printf 'abc\0baz\n' | sed 's/\x00//g' | cat -v
abcbaz

so, for in-place editing, use sed -i 's/\x00//g' filename (See also: sed in-place flag that works both on Mac (BSD) and Linux )

Unable to remove control @ from file

1 Answers1