Dired appears with 015 (Octal?)

Question

Recently, my Dired listing in Emacs starting appearing with 015 at the end of each line:

I'm not sure what brought it on. I had been making some changes with my Spacemacs layers but since then I've gone to a completely out-of-the-box Spacemacs configuration and the 015 s are still there. It makes Dired pretty much useless because if I try to select a file or drill into a directory it doesn't recognize it. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Those are Control M characters. Emacs writes them as either ^M (one char, not two) or \015 (again, one char, not 4).

This Emacs Wiki page tells you about this: EndOfLineTips .

This is some of what it says:

If you see ^M in your file, you may have opened a file with DOS-style line endings (carriage return + line feed) while Emacs assumes it has Unix-style line endings (line feed only). (The carriage-return character, sometimes abbreviated as CR , is ^M . The line-feed character, sometimes abbreviated as LF , is ^J .)

You can reopen the file with the correct line ending with a command like Cx Cm r dos .

Cx Cm r is bound to revert-buffer-with-coding-system . Use Ch k or Ch f to see more about it.

See also ( Ch v ) variable buffer-file-coding-system .

Also: use i line endings in the Emacs manual, to go to node Coding Systems . That tells all you need to know about this.

This question and its answers might also help. And see the UNIX/Linux command dos2unix .