Menu
Why did DOS/Windows and Mac decide to use \r\n and \r for line ending instead of \n? Was it just a result of trying to be "different" from Unix?
And now that Mac OS X is Unix (-like), did Apple switch to \n from \r?
544
The Multics operating system began development in 1964 and used LF alone as its newline. Multics used a device driver to translate this character to whatever sequence a printer needed (including extra padding characters), and the single byte was more convenient for programming.
Unix Line Endings. Text files created on DOS/Windows machines have different line endings than files created on Unix/Linux. DOS uses carriage return and line feed ("\r\n") as a line ending, which Unix uses just line feed ("\n").
Line endings also called newline, end of line (EOL) or line break is a control character or sequence of control characters in a character encoding specification (e.g. ASCII or EBCDIC) that is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.
The CRLF abbreviation refers to Carriage Return and Line Feed. CR and LF are special characters (ASCII 13 and 10 respectively, also referred to as \r\n) that are used to signify the End of Line (EOL).
DOS inherited CR-LF line endings (what you're calling \r\n, just making the ascii characters explicit) from CP/M. CP/M inherited it from the various DEC operating systems which influenced CP/M designer Gary Kildall.
CR-LF was used so that the teletype machines would return the print head to the left margin (CR = carriage return), and then move to the next line (LF = line feed).
The Unix guys handled that in the device driver, and when necessary translated LF to CR-LF on output to devices that needed it.
And as you guessed, Mac OS X now uses LF.
181
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
