Anyone who has worked extensively between Linux machines and Windows machines has at some time come across a lot of badly formatted documents. Inititally, I would spend a lot of time finding the end of the line and pressing to format the document properly. After months of doing this, I realized that this is due to the line endings or the end of line (`EOL`) ([see Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline)). Windows sees the end of a line differently from the way \*nix sees it.

There are a quite a few end of line characters. Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed(LF) being the more often used. To understand these, consider a typewriter. Typewriters have two actions to move to a new line -

  • Line Feed - Feeds the paper up one line, but keeps the typing position (cursor) at the same spot.
  • Carriage Return - Moves the typing position to the start of the line, without moving across lines.

When one strikes the line feed lever of a typewriter, the paper is first fed. Further forcing the lever causes it to move the paper carriage to the start of the line (carriage return). The LF and CR behave in the same way.

System End of Line Character Symbolic Representation
Windows / DOS CR + LF \r\n
*Nix LF \n
Risc OS LF + CR \n\r
MacOS upto version 9 CR \r

The table above lists line endings for a few platforms.

Knowing about the line breaks did not help me in formatting the files. I continued fixing my files the hard way for years, before stumbling across the utility - dos2unix. On Ubuntu, this can be installed easily using

sudo apt-get install dos2unix

and may be used as easily as -

dos2unix filename

This changes DOS / Windows line endings to *Nix format. The other commands are -

unix2dos filename
mac2unix filename
unix2mac filename

This is a utility than could have saved me hours of work. This utility also exists for cygwin.