On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:52:37 -0800, Gordon Charrick <gordonmc@xxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm looking for a way to convert a file with control characters that do > things like bold, underline, etc into a plain ordinary text file. I > haven't figured out how to do it yet. Anyone have a nice simple > solution? An example of a file with this problem is > /usr/share/doc/pam-0.77/txts/pam.txt The col(1) and colcrt(1) commands are sometimes useful for this sort of thing. But they'll leave parts of escape sequences behind for those sequences they don't understand. This sed command seems to do the trick, at least for your mentioned file: sed -e 's/\o033\o133[0-9][0-9]*m//g' <infile >outfile -- Deron Meranda