Hi Simon
Thanks for the help.
You got me thinking!
The problem was: I was running DEBIAN WOODY which is the stable version of Debian and the apt-get had only recieved stable version of NANO (the editor I use).
this satbel version of Nano 1.0.? was not capabe of converting from DOS file type.
WHAT I DID:
Incase anyone else has this problem, here is what i did.
I changed the source.list for apt-get in /etc/apt/soure.list to include a testing site
e.g. deb
ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib
then I ran # apt-get update
then # apt-get install nano
This installed nano version 1.2.4 which now displays the text without DOS ^M at the end of each line.
Then i changed the source.list file back again to the stable addresses.
NOTE: I didn't pick this up straight away because my other servers are DEBIAN SARGE which is currently a testing release and this apt-get got the testing version of NANO.
Also i did a apt-get install sysutils (on stable), this is a group of tools for debian which includes dos2unix or fromdos, both of which are excellent for actually converting the files to Unix type i.e. ^J not ^M.
My solution with the nano upgrade now means I can view and edit the files with no Probs of the ^M being in the way.
Cheers
Steve