tr(1) — Linux manual page

TR(1)                         User Commands                         TR(1)

NAME         top

       tr - translate or delete characters

SYNOPSIS         top

       tr [OPTION]... STRING1 [STRING2]

DESCRIPTION         top

       Translate, squeeze, and/or delete characters from standard input,
       writing to standard output.  STRING1 and STRING2 specify arrays of
       characters ARRAY1 and ARRAY2 that control the action.

       -c, -C, --complement
              use the complement of ARRAY1

       -d, --delete
              delete characters in ARRAY1, do not translate

       -s, --squeeze-repeats
              replace each sequence of a repeated character that is
              listed in the last specified ARRAY, with a single
              occurrence of that character

       -t, --truncate-set1
              first truncate ARRAY1 to length of ARRAY2

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

       ARRAYs are specified as strings of characters.  Most represent
       themselves.  Interpreted sequences are:

       \NNN   character with octal value NNN (1 to 3 octal digits)

       \\     backslash

       \a     audible BEL

       \b     backspace

       \f     form feed

       \n     new line

       \r     return

       \t     horizontal tab

       \v     vertical tab

       CHAR1-CHAR2
              all characters from CHAR1 to CHAR2 in ascending order

       [CHAR*]
              in ARRAY2, copies of CHAR until length of ARRAY1

       [CHAR*REPEAT]
              REPEAT copies of CHAR, REPEAT octal if starting with 0

       [:alnum:]
              all letters and digits

       [:alpha:]
              all letters

       [:blank:]
              all horizontal whitespace

       [:cntrl:]
              all control characters

       [:digit:]
              all digits

       [:graph:]
              all printable characters, not including space

       [:lower:]
              all lower case letters

       [:print:]
              all printable characters, including space

       [:punct:]
              all punctuation characters

       [:space:]
              all horizontal or vertical whitespace

       [:upper:]
              all upper case letters

       [:xdigit:]
              all hexadecimal digits

       [=CHAR=]
              all characters which are equivalent to CHAR

       Translation occurs if -d is not given and both STRING1 and STRING2
       appear.  -t is only significant when translating.  ARRAY2 is
       extended to length of ARRAY1 by repeating its last character as
       necessary.  Excess characters of ARRAY2 are ignored.  Character
       classes expand in unspecified order; while translating, [:lower:]
       and [:upper:] may be used in pairs to specify case conversion.
       Squeezing occurs after translation or deletion.

BUGS         top

       Full support is available only for safe single-byte locales, in
       which every possible input byte represents a single character.
       The C locale is safe in GNU systems, so you can avoid this issue
       in the shell by running LC_ALL=C tr instead of plain tr.

AUTHOR         top

       Written by Jim Meyering.

REPORTING BUGS         top

       GNU coreutils online help:
       <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report any translation bugs to
       <https://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT         top

       Copyright © 2025 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+:
       GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
       There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO         top

       Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/tr>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) tr invocation'

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project
       can be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you
       have a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball coreutils-9.7.tar.xz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/⟩ on 2025-08-11.  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the
       page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information
       in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
       send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

GNU coreutils 9.7               April 2025                          TR(1)

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