How to remove ^[, and all of the escape sequences in a file using linux shell scripting

Question

We want to remove ^[, and all of the escape sequences.

sed is not working and is giving us this error:

$ sed 's/^[//g' oldfile > newfile; mv newfile oldfile;
sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command

$ sed -i '' -e 's/^[//g' somefile
sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command

Answer 1

Are you looking for ansifilter?

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Two things you can do: enter the literal escape (in bash:)

Using keyboard entry:

sed 's/Ctrl-vEsc//g'

alternatively

sed 's/Ctrl-vCtrl-[//g'

Or you can use character escapes:

sed 's/x1b//g'

or for all control characters:

sed 's/[x01-x1Fx7F]//g' # NOTE: zaps TAB character too!