I've seen answers to the questions, but those answers are not from a windows perspective from what I can tell.
Windows uses CR LF, Unix uses LF, Mac uses LF and classic mac uses something else. I don't have the brainpower to tell that somehow, if a file is using a different line ending than what I am typing, I get errors when trying to run the script/program which frankly, don't make much sense. After conversion, the script works just fine.
Is there anyway to preemptively check what line endings a file uses, on Windows?
Try file -k txt will tell you. It will output with CRLF line endings for DOS/Windows line endings. It will output with CR line endings for MAC line endings. And for Linux/Unix line "LF" it will just output text .
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").
If a file has DOS/Windows-style CR-LF line endings, then if you look at it using a Unix-based tool you'll see CR ('\r') characters at the end of each line.
The End of Line (EOL) sequence ( 0x0D 0x0A , \r\n ) is actually two ASCII characters, a combination of the CR and LF characters. It moves the cursor both down to the next line and to the beginning of that line.
use a text editor like notepad++ that can help you with understanding the line ends.
It will show you the line end formats used as either Unix(LF) or Macintosh(CR) or Windows(CR LF) on the task bar of the tool.
you can also go to View->Show Symbol->Show End Of Line to display the line ends as LF/ CR LF/CR.
Steps:
binaries
and dependencies
zip files:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/file.htm
c:\gnuwin32
Then you can execute:
c:\gnuwin32\bin\file.exe my-lf-file.txt
my-lf-file.txt; ASCII text
c:\gnuwin32\bin\file.exe my-crlf-file.txt
my-crlf-file.txt; ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
Of course you can add c:\gnuwin32\bin
to your %PATH%
variable, to be able to access it without providing the full path.
UPDATE:
If you have git
installed you can launch git-bash
and run file
command from there.
Or you can install this subsystem, as described in the official Microsoft documentation, and get access to the file
command.
I too am looking for a "native" windows scripting solution. So far, just have to read a line or 2 in VB in binary fashion and inspect the characters.
One tool to check "manually" is Notepad++. The status bar has a newline style indicator on the right end next to the file encoding indicator.
It looks like this in version 7.5.6
Other editors with Hex mode can show you also.
In Powershell, this command returns "True" for a Windows style file and "False" for a *nix style file.
(Get-Content '\\FILESERVER0001\Fshares\NETwork Shares\20181206179900.TXT' -Raw) -match "\r\n$"
This came from Matt over here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35354009/1337544
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