“Translate, squeeze, and/or delete characters from standard input,
writing to standard output.”
… that’s the manpage description of the shell-command I just found (with the help of a good friend) … and besides sed this is a very handy way to do simple string-operations on stdin.
He used it to replace (old) Mac newline characters with Unix newline charaters within files (as seen on wikipedia):
tr '\r' '\n' < old.file > new.file
Btw I still think that it’s stupid that users still have all the hazzle with newline charaters - why can’t the OS-developers just recognize all types of newlines? :(