mc and mcedit problem - ^M

[rwright msiinet com]

I am using Midnight Commander under SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for IBM
zSeries.   I'm an old mainframer building Linux skills who likes your
product because it makes a lot of things a lot easier and I like the editor
because I don't have to use vi (thank God).  I have encountered a small
problem with your editor that is driving me nuts.

I am editing some shell scripts.  At some point when I edit them, I'm
getting some sort of special character or something inserted at the end of
each line by your editor.   You cannot see these at all when viewing the
file in your editor but they're there, and if you use the vi editor to look
at the file, they show up as a  ^M at the end of each line.  I can start
with a file that does not have these, and at some point which I haven't
nailed down yet, they get put there while using mcedit.   These are
apparently causing the shell script not to run correctly.   What are these,
and why are they being put there?  Can I stop this?  Is it a bug?  Thanks
in advance for your reply.   Here is the information from mc --version...

GNU Midnight Commander 4.5.55
Edition: text mode
Virtual File System: tarfs, extfs, ftpfs, mcfs, undelfs
With builtin Editor
Using S-Lang library with terminfo database
With subshell support as default
With support for background operations
With mouse support on xterm and Linux console
Using default locale

Randy Wright
zSeries Integration Engineer
MSI Systems Integrators
8000 Maryland Avenue, Suite 410
St. Louis, Mo.  63105
Office (314) 726-3635
Pager (314) 491-5026
Email  rwright msiinet com