I am trying to remove non-printable character (for e.g. ^@) from records in my file. Since the volume to records is too big in the file using cat is not an option as the loop is taking too much time.
I tried using
sed -i 's/[^@a-zA-Z 0-9`~!@#$%^&*()_+\[\]\\{}|;'\'':",.\/<>?]//g' FILENAME
but still the ^@ characters are not removed.
Also I tried using
awk '{ sub("[^a-zA-Z0-9\"!@#$%^&*|_\[](){}", ""); print } FILENAME > NEW FILE
but it also did not help.
Can anybody suggest some alternative way to remove non-printable characters?
Used tr -cd but it is removing accented characters. But they are required in the file.
Perhaps you could go with the complement of [:print:], which contains all printable characters:
tr -cd '[:print:]' < file > newfile
If your version of tr doesn't support multi-byte characters (it seems that many don't), this works for me with GNU sed (with UTF-8 locale settings):
sed 's/[^[:print:]]//g' file