Remove Windows carriage return characters with vi

This is pretty standard search an replace command in vi, but I always forget how to specify the carriage return character (‘^M‘): Ctrl+V for the ‘^‘ and Ctrl+M for the ‘M‘

The command is:

:%s/^M//g

For those new to vi:

While you have the file opened in vi, hit Escape to make sure you are in command mode. Then type “:” to go to the command line and then type the string shown above. The ^M portion of this command requires typing Ctrl+V to get the ^ and then Ctrl+M to insert the M. The %s is a substitute operation, the slashes again separate the characters we want to remove and the text (nothing) we want to replace it with. The “g” (global) means to do this on every line in the file.