The End-of-Line Story

zephyr19 — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:32:29 +0000

I got the answer to a mystery that existed with me since very long. When one creates a file in an editor in windows and opens it in unix in vim, the editor shows weird ^M characters at the end of each line.

I read this today. Now I know what that ^M actually stands for. Windows DOS (MS-DOS) and unix have different conventions for representing newlines. Windows uses both Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF) to represent a new line, whereas for unix, LF alone is a new line and it leaves CR as it is. It is this CR that is being shown as ^M (which is the assigned key stroke to generate a carriage return).

As the document says, because some person thought something some time in the past, we are faced with this confusion of CR LF and LF everywhere. And now we are writing utilities like dos2unix for this purpose !

By the way, the way to insert a CR in a string is ‘\r’ and LF is ‘\n’.

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The End-of-Line Story