regular expression to replace ^M with \n or to remove ^M

Question

I have a file where I want to remove ^M character from below

line1;^Mline2;

to have output as below:

line1; line2;

How can I achieve this without creating a temporary file? Would appreciate any shell command, perl command or eclipse find and replace.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if by ^M you mean the literal string ^M or the control-character (carriage-return). If you mean the literal string:

sed -e 's/\^M/\n/g' file

If you mean carriage-return:

sed -e 's/\r/\n/g' file