Windows to linux text file

Now, the reason most people don’t know about all this is because nobody really should have to. But while users of Linux distros and Mac OS can open Windows text files in basically any available editor and not even know the difference, the same can’t be said for Windows users opening files created in one of the other operating systems.

If you type up a simple text file in Ubuntu and save it in the default «Unix/Linux» format, in Windows it will appear as one continuous paragraph, with black squares where the line breaks (or new paragraphs) should be. While you can open the file in a more advanced text editor (or proper word processor) to view it as it should look, others you’ve sent it to are just likely to double-click it and let it open in Notepad (which can only handle MS-DOS EOL).

Occasionally, the reverse is the issue, but you can convert Windows text files to UNIX easily with Gedit, as well as convert them via the terminal, so hopefully the following guide will be of use.

For more detailed info on End-Of-Line, go to the Wikipedia page.

Or if you’re wanting to do the reverse, check out how to convert to Windows format via the terminal and with Save As� in Gedit.

Converting Windows EOL to Linux via the Terminal

If you find the text editor you’re using to display Windows files in Ubuntu shows ^M instead of a line break (not very likely with even the most lightweight text editors, but something you’ll probably come across if you display the text in a terminal), don’t worry � just convert them to Unix/Linux format.

While you can actually open them in Gedit and use Save As� to save over them (or to create copies) in the correct format, for more than a couple of files this would be the long, complicated solution.

By far the quickest and easiest approach is to convert the offending files via the command-line. This way, you could batch-convert hundreds of such files at once, not have to do them individually.
There are actually quite a few ways to do this, but we’ll look at a couple of tiny packages you can install, and the related commands to use.

The first � the tofrodos package � is undoubtedly the most widely-used, so we’ll look at that in detail � especially since many of the guides out there are outdated, since the commands it contains have been renamed.

The second is a little package called flip, and since it’s tiny and won’t cause any issues, it’s worth installing as a backup (just in case. I found it useful after trying to get tofrodos going on a new system, before I found out the commands were changed).

There is no actual command tofrodos, as it is just the package that contains the commands todos and fromdos. Currently, the vast majority of online guides will list the commands as unix2dos and dos2unix, but as the developer states:

With this release the symlinks «unix2dos» and «dos2unix» are dropped from the package. This will allow the introduction of the original dos2unix package, which also supports conversion to MacOS style files.

So now you can choose to use either todos (to convert to Windows) and fromdos (to convert to Linux), or just fromdos with options (fromdos -u to convert to DOS, and fromdos -d to convert to UNIX, though obviously the -d option really isn’t needed, as it is the default behaviour for the fromdos command).

We’ll use fromdos, as it is easier to remember, and show how to alter a single file, or all text files in a given folder. When you’re ready to proceed, open a terminal in the folder containing the text file(s) and use one of the following commands (note that for the purpose of illustration, the .txt suffix is used, but you can specify any other extension for your text files).

To Convert to UNIX/Linux via Terminal:

Single file (remember to replace filename.txt with the actual name of the file)

fromdos filename.txt

All text files in a folder (if the extension differs to .txt, simply replace it in the command)

fromdos *.txt

Similarly, flip is easy to use:

flip -u filename.txt (or flip -u *.txt for multiple files)

HowTo UNIX — Linux Convert DOS Newlines CR-LF to Unix-Linux Format

Task: Convert Dos TO Unix Using tr Command

Type the following command:

Task: Convert Dos TO Unix Using Perl One Liner

Type the following command:

perl -pi -e 's/\r\n/\n/g' input.file

Task: Convert UNIX to DOS format using sed command

Type the following command:

$ sed 's/$'"/`echo \\\r`/" input.txt > output.txt

Note: sed version may not work under different UNIX/Linux variant,refer your local sed man page for more info.

Task: Convert DOS newlines (CR/LF) to Unix format using sed command

If you are using BASH shell type the following command (press Ctrl-V then Ctrl-M to get pattern or special symbol)

$ sed 's/^M$//' input.txt > output.txt

Note: sed version may not work under different UNIX/Linux variant, refer your local sed man page for more info.

The text files under Unix end their line with the symbol «\n» (called Line Feed and noted LF, ASCII code = 0A).

Text files under DOS by a «line», end their line with the symbol «\r»(called Carriage Return and noted CR, ASCII 0D).
Thus, every line in a DOS file ends with a CRLF sequence, or \r\n.

Conversion from DOS to UNIX

Simply delete the «\r» (carriage return) at the end of the line.
The «\ r» is symbolically represented by «^M», which is obtained by the following sequence of keys «CTRL-V» + «CTRL-M».

Note:

With the GNU-sed(gsed 3.02.80) version, we can use the ASCII notation:

Conversion from UNIX to DOS

Just do the opposite of the previous command, namely (the «^M» being entered in the same way (CTRL-V + CTRL-M)):
Note:

With the GNU-sed(gsed 3.02.80) version, we can use the symbolic notation «\r»:

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Convert between Unix and Windows text files

The format of Windows and Unix text files differs slightly. In Windows, lines end with both the line feed and carriage return ASCII characters, but Unix uses only a line feed. As a consequence, some Windows applications will not show the line breaks in Unix-format files. Likewise, Unix programs may display the carriage returns in Windows text files with Ctrl-m ( ^M ) characters at the end of each line.

There are many ways to solve this problem. This document provides instructions for using FTP, screen capture, unix2dos and dos2unix, tr , awk , Perl, and vi to do the conversion. To use these utilities, the files you are converting must be on a Unix computer.

In the instructions below, replace unixfile.txt with the name of your Unix file, and replace winfile.txt with the Windows filename.

FTP

When using an FTP program to move a text file between Unix and Windows, be sure the file is transferred in ASCII format, so the document is transformed into a text format appropriate for the host. Some FTP programs, especially graphical applications, do this automatically. If you are using command line FTP, before you begin the transfer, enter:

tr

You can use tr to remove all carriage returns and Ctrl-z ( ^Z ) characters from a Windows file:

However, you cannot use tr to convert a document from Unix format to Windows.

awk

To use awk to convert a Windows file to Unix, enter:

 awk '< sub("\r$", ""); print >' winfile.txt > unixfile.txt

To convert a Unix file to Windows, enter:

 awk 'sub("$", "\r")' unixfile.txt > winfile.txt

Older versions of awk do not include the sub function. In such cases, use the same command, but replace awk with gawk or nawk .

Perl

To convert a Windows text file to a Unix text file using Perl, enter:

To convert from a Unix text file to a Windows text file, enter:

You must use single quotation marks in either command line. This prevents your shell from trying to evaluate anything inside.

vi

In vi, you can remove carriage return ( ^M ) characters with the following command:

To input the ^M character, press Ctrl-v , and then press Enter or return .

In vim, use :set ff=unix to convert to Unix; use :set ff=dos to convert to Windows.

Related documents

This is document acux in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-06-27 11:47:04 .

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