CR/LF conversion

Historically, the Mac OS, DOS/windows and Unix use different character sequences to indicate the end of a line (EOL). While the Mac uses the ASCII character 13 (carriage return, CR), it is ASCII 10 (Linefeed, LF) in Unix and the combination of both in DOS/Windows (CR followed by LF, CRLF).

With the following shell scripts, text files can be translated from one convention to the other:

dos2mac, dos2unix, unix2mac, mac2unix.

The corresponding file extensions (.mac, .unix) are added to the file name of the converted file (the original file is left untouched).

Important disclaimer: these scripts are supplied without warranties of any kind, use them at your own risk! Don't use them on binary (non-text) files.

• Download mudlfconv.tgz.

  gzipped tar, 0.3kB. SHA1 = c7e53800008a1e677503faa14b66f47d8f1f5525

• Open a terminal and unpack it with sudo tar -xPzf (by default to /usr/local/bin), or to another destination in your PATH.
• After using the command rehash, you can access the scripts like that:
  
  • dos2mac txtfile ...
  • dos2unix txtfile ...
  • unix2mac txtfile ...
  • mac2unix txtfile ...

  For example, the command

  % dos2mac foo

  creates foo.mac with CRLF replaced by CR, etc.

  This works also with wildcard characters, e.g. % mac2unix foo*.txt.

The scripts are mainly based on the command tr (translate characters).