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DOS text files traditionally have a carriage return and line feed character as newline character or symbol – mostly for historic reasons i think. Unix and Linux on the other hand have a line feed character as newline character in text files – and Macs have yet another “standard”.

From time to time I need to convert from one text file “standard” to another.

Red Hat-based Linux distributions are normally distributed with a small tool called dos2unix, which is able to do the conversion job very easy, but Debian-based Linux distributions like Debian itself and Ubuntu do not include the dos2unix tool by default.

The dos2unix tool i available in the Debian / Ubuntu package called tofrodos. To install the packages just type:

aptitude install tofrodos

Once you have the tofrodos package installed you are able to use the dos2unix command from the command line, like this:

dos2unix dosfile.txt

After running the command all the historic and crappy windows newlines are gone.

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