I have some very large data files (several 100 GB) that I want to load into a Linux version of Oracle via sqlldr. Unfortunately the files were created on a windows machine and contain the extra windows ^M linefeed. When I try to load the files with the extra newline, sqlldr has an error.

Is there any way for me to use sqlldr without having to run dos2unix on the data files first? The files are large enough that this takes several hours to complete, and I have to do this frequently enough for it to be very annoying. I unfortunately do not have control over the source data, so cannot change it to come with unix newlines.

>I unfortunately do not have control over the source data, so cannot change it to come with unix newlines.
Not necessarily.

If the files are transfered from Windows to *nix using "ftp" in ASCII mode;
then the extra character will be eliminated as part of the transfer process.

Try it; you'll like it!

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately my data source is coming on a external hard drive, so there's no FTP or network transfer involved at this point. The FTP overhead would actually be more than dos2unix .

Any other suggestions?

I think you can specify multibyte record delimiters in the control file:

Excellent, that works wonderfully - thanks!