I need way to find all files containing odd ^M invisible characters - php

Question

I know for a fact that these PHP files exist. I can open them in VIM and see the offending character.
I found several links here on stackoverflow that suggest remedies for this but none of them work properly. I know for a fact that several files do not contain the ^M characters (CRLF line endings) however, I keep getting false positives.
find . -type f -name "*.php" -exec fgrep -l $'\r' "{}" \;
Returns false positives.
find . -not -type d -name "*.php" -exec file "{}" ";" | grep CRLF
Returns nothing.
etc...etc...
Edit: Yes, I am executing these lines in the offending directory.

Answer 1

Do you use a source control repository for storing your files? Many of them have the ability to automatically make sure that line endings of files are correct upon commit. I can give you an example with Subversion.
I have a pre-commit hook that allows me to specify what properties in Subversion must be on what files in order for those files to be committed. For example, I could specify that any file that ends in *.php must have the property svn:eol-style set to LF.
If you use this, you'll never have an issue with the ^M line endings again.
As for finding them, I've been able to do this:
$ find . -type f -exec egrep -l "^M$" {} \;
Where ^M is a Control-M. With Bash or Kornshell, you can get that by pressing Control-V, then Control-M. You might have to have set -o vi for it to work.

Answer 2

A little Perl can not only reveal the files but change them as desired. To find your culprits, do:
find . -type f -name "*.php" -exec perl -ne 'print $ARGV if m{\r$}' {} + > badstuff
Now, if you want to remove the pesky carriage return:
perl -pe 's{\r$}{}' $(<badstuff)
...which eliminates the carriage return from all of the affected files. If you want to do that and create a backup copy too, do:
perl -pi.old -e 's{\r$}{}' $(<badstuff)

Answer 3

I tend to use the instructions provided at http://kb.iu.edu/data/agiz.html to do this. The following will change the ^M in a specific file to a \n return and place that into a new file using tr:
tr '\r' '\n' < macfile.txt > unixfile.txt
This does the same thing just using perl instead. With this one you can probably pipe in a series of files:
perl -p -e 's/\r/\n/g' < macfile.txt > unixfile.txt

Answer 4

The file command will tell you which kinds of line-end characters it sees:
$ file to-do.txt
to-do.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
$ file mixed.txt
mixed.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF, LF line terminators
So you could run e.g.
find . -type f -name "*.php" -exec file "{}" \; | grep -c CRLF
to count the number of files that have at least some CRLF line endings.
You could also use dos2unix or fromdos to convert them all to LF only:
find . -type f -name "*.php" -exec dos2unix "{}" \;
You might also care if these tools would touch all of the files, or just the ones that have to be converted; check the tool documentation