tr (Unix)

tr is a command in Unix-like operating systems. It is an abbreviation of translate or transliterate, indicating its operation of replacing or removing specific characters in its input data set.

The utility reads a byte stream from its standard input and writes the result to the standard output. As arguments, it takes two sets of characters (generally of the same length), and replaces occurrences of the characters in the first set with the corresponding elements from the second set. For example,

tr 'abcd' 'jkmn'

maps all characters a to j, b to k, c to m, and d to n.

The character set may be abbreviated by using character ranges. The previous example could be written:

tr 'a-d' 'jkmn'

In POSIX-compliant versions of tr, the set represented by a character range depends on the locale's collating order, so it is safer to avoid character ranges in scripts that might be executed in a locale different from that in which they were written. Ranges can often be replaced with POSIX character sets such as [:alpha:].

The s flag causes tr to compress sequences of identical adjacent characters in its output to a single token. For example,

tr -s '\n'

replaces sequences of one or more newline characters with a single newline.

The d flag causes tr to delete all tokens of the specified set of characters from its input. In this case, only a single character set argument is used. The following command removes carriage return characters.

tr -d '\r'

The c flag indicates the complement of the first set of characters. The invocation

tr -cd '[:alnum:]'

therefore removes all non-alphanumeric characters.

Most versions of tr, including GNU tr and classic Unix tr, operate on single-byte characters and are not Unicode compliant. An exception is the Heirloom Toolchest implementation, which provides basic Unicode support.

Ruby and Perl also have an internal tr operator, which operates analogously. Tcl's string map command is more general in that it maps strings to strings while tr maps characters to characters.

External links

tr(1) - Unix 8th Edition manual page.
The program's manpage
usage examples at examplenow.com

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins

File system	cat cd chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fsck fuser ln ls mkdir mount mv pax pwd rm rmdir size split tee touch type umask

Processes	at bg chroot cron fg kill killall nice pgrep pkill ps pstree time top

User environment	clear env exit finger history id logname mesg passwd su sudo uptime talk tput uname w wall who whoami write

Text processing	awk banner basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fmt fold head iconv join less more nl paste sed sort spell strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs

Shell builtins	alias echo expr printf sleep test true and false unset wait yes

Networking	dig host ifconfig inetd netcat netstat nslookup ping rdate rlogin route ssh traceroute

Searching	find grep locate whatis whereis

Documentation	apropos help man

Miscellaneous	bc dc cal lp od

List of Unix utilities

tr (Unix)

See also

External links