[GRLUG] unix2dos?

[Don Ellis]

Sometimes a text editor handles it just fine, but it can require
actually looking at the documentation to find out how. In Vim, for
example, the settings for filetype vs. fileformat may not be that
obvious. Once you figure it out, it becomes drop dead easy.

Some text editors can be scripted to batch process a list of files.
Consider Perl to be one such editor; dos2unix etc can be written as a
one-liner command line, though some safeguards might be a good idea
for some users, as in this easily found (but somewhat verbose)
example:

    http://www.obviously.com/tech_tips/dos2unix.html

The active part in this example is:

       while( <INPUT> ) {
            s/\r\n$/\n/;     # convert CR LF to LF
            print OUTPUT $_;
        }

Another example is:

    http://www.wellho.net/resources/ex.php4?item=p210/cv

This example is really a one liner with comments detailing why it was
written that way. It could as easily be issued on the command line
without a saved script, using the -e switch, as in:

    perl -p -i.bak -e "s/foo/bar/; ... "

(Camel 2, Chapter 6, on my favorite page in the whole book)
The page on these switches (-p, -i, -e) explains why the first example
can be rewritten with the magic input operator (<>), then why it can
all be done on a single line.

I do kind of like writing the one liner into a script (or alias, or
shell function) so it's handy to get to and I don't have to remember
the scripting details. Otherwise, using vim or your favorite editor is
very handy too.

--Don Ellis


On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2013-08-24 at 12:19 -0400, Eric Beversluis wrote:
> > I'm reading in Sobell, _Linux Commands..._, where he talks about
> > unix2dos being necessary to send Linux text files to a Windows machine,
> > and am confused.
> >
> > I think that I successfully send text files back and forth between
> > Linux, Windows and Mac all the time without having to use this utility.
> > Is this something that is obsolete in more modern operating systems? Or
> > do the text editors now handle this automatically?
>
> SOME editors handle it correctly.   For example - notepad.exe does not,
> but wordpad.exe will work just fine.
>
> There really isn't and problems with the files, it just depends on what
> you want to do.