Backspace Issue on Linux File

backspace issue on linux file

You need to change file preferences: go to Preferences -> Files and change "Create new file as " to UNIX. Also, your might want to enable "Check invalid CR/LF, null character when loading" option.

Bash - process backspace control character when redirecting output to file

Thanks for your comments! I ended up piping the output of that program to AWK Script I linked in the question. I get a well-formed file in the end.

the_program | ./awk_crush.sh > output.txt

The only downside is that I get the output only once the program itself is finished, even though the initial output exceeds 5M and should be passed in the lesser chunks. I don't know the exact reason, perhaps AWK script waits for EOF on stdin. Either way, on more modern system I would use

stdbuf -oL the_program | ./awk_crush.sh > output.txt

to process the output line-by-line. I'm stuck on RHEL4 with expired support though, so I'm unable to use neither stdbuf nor unbuffer. I'll leave it as-is, it's fine too.

The contents of awk_crush.sh are based on this answer, except with ^H sequences (which are supposed to be ASCII 08 characters entered via VIM commands) replaced with escape sequence \b:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
function crushify(data) {
  while (data ~ /[^\b]\b/) {
      gsub(/[^\b]\b/, "", data) 
  }                                                     
  print data
}

crushify($0)

Basically, it replaces character before \b and \b itself with empty string, and repeats it while there are \b in the string - just what I needed. It doesn't care for other escape sequences though, but if it's necessary, there's a more complete SED solution by Thomas Dickey.

Backspace key not working in Vim/vi

To allow backspacing over everything in insert mode (including automatically inserted indentation, line breaks and start of insert) you can set the backspace option:

:set backspace=indent,eol,start

or

:set backspace=2  "compatible with version 5.4 and earlier

By default this option is empty, not allowing you to backspace over the above-mentioned things. This is the standard Vi behavior.

You can put this line to your vimrc file to have it set automatically when Vim starts:

set backspace=indent,eol,start  " more powerful backspacing

Also, starting from Vim 8.0 if no user vimrc file is found, Vim will set backspace to this value by loading the defaults.vim script.

Bash backspace character correct use

The correct version of the file is the one saved on the filesystem. Sublime text and gedit are reading the file and representing in different ways.

backspace does not work git bash

I had this same problem today after switching to mintty with a fresh version of git. In my case, it was an old .bashrc file I'd been carrying around for many years with the line export TERM=ansi. After removing that and starting a new bash, everything works again.

More generally, to debug, I was suspicious of all the dot-config stuff in my home directory--so I moved things like .bash_profile, .bashrc, .inputrc, etc. into a temporary directory where they wouldn't be read by bash. Then, I started bash and saw that it worked. I mention it because, if it isn't specifically the TERM issue I had, you might be able to debug using the same technique.

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