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

Solution 1:

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

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

Using RipGrep (depending on your shell, you might need to quote the last argument):

rg -l \r

-l, --files-with-matches
Only print the paths with at least one match.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

Solution 4:

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

grep -lUP '\r$'

could be used.

Solution 5:

# list files containing dos line endings (CRLF)

cr="$(printf "\r")"    # alternative to ctrl-V ctrl-M

grep -Ilsr "${cr}$" . 

grep -Ilsr $'\r$' .   # yet another & even shorter alternative