need dos end of line character in unix file, without Unix end of line appended

Question

I need to create a dos format text file on Unix, whose end of line character is \r\n.

In Unix and vi, I can see (via "set list") the $ end of line character.
When I convert the file to DOS format using:

perl -i -pne "s/\n/\r\n/g" i.txt  

I get end-of-line as: ^M$.
This is close, but what I need is a file ending in \r\n (ie: ^M only).

Example i.txt file (say, if have set list enabled in vi):
starting text line one$
starting text line two$

converted produces:
starting text line one^M$
starting text line two^M$

need:
starting text line one^M
starting text line two^M

So I need the dos single-character representation for end of line. unix2dos didn't help. Suggestions?

Answer 1

The $ does not represent a character. It simply shows where the line ends.

The purpose of this is to show trailing whitespace, like in this example explaining uniq output:

$ uniq file
foo
foo 

$ cat -vE file
foo$
foo $

Since it's just a visual marker, asking how to delete it doesn't make sense. It was never there. If you want \r\n, then ^M$ is correct. Here's an example of this, verifiable by the hex dump:

$ cat -vE file
foo^M$
bar^M$

$ od -c -t x1 < file
0000000   f   o   o  \r  \n   b   a   r  \r  \n
         66  6f  6f  0d  0a  62  61  72  0d  0a