---
layout: page
author: Alessandro Luini
category-page: advanced
category-title: Advanced commands
tags: translate
title: tr
---





<p> 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.</p>

   <h3>How to use</h3>

     <p> 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,
     </p>

       <pre> <code>tr 'abcd' 'jkmn'</code></pre>
       <p> maps all characters a to j, b to k, c to m, and d to n.</p>
       <p> The character set may be abbreviated by using character ranges. The
         previous example could be written: </p>

         <pre> tr 'a-d' 'jkmn' </pre>


   <h3>Flags</h3>
   <ul>
     <li><h4> -s:</h4> The s flag causes tr to compress sequences of identical
       adjacent characters in its output to a single token.
       <pre> tr -s '\n'</pre>
       replaces sequences of one or more newline characters with a single
       newline.</li>

      <li><h4> -d</h4>: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.
        <pre>tr -d '\r'</pre>
        </li>