How to find out line-endings in a text file?

Question

I\'m trying to use something in bash to show me the line endings in a file printed rather than interpreted. The file is a dump from SSIS/SQL Server being read in by a Linux

Answer 1

To show CR as ^M in less use less -u or type -u once less is open.

man less says:

-u or --underline-special

      Causes backspaces and carriage returns to be treated  as  print-
      able  characters;  that  is,  they are sent to the terminal when
      they appear in the input.

Answer 2

You can use the file utility to give you an indication of the type of line endings.

Unix:

$ file testfile1.txt
testfile.txt: ASCII text

"DOS":

$ file testfile2.txt
testfile2.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

To convert from "DOS" to Unix:

$ dos2unix testfile2.txt

To convert from Unix to "DOS":

$ unix2dos testfile1.txt

Converting an already converted file has no effect so it's safe to run blindly (i.e. without testing the format first) although the usual disclaimers apply, as always.

Answer 3

You can use vim -b filename to edit a file in binary mode, which will show ^M characters for carriage return and a new line is indicative of LF being present, indicating Windows CRLF line endings. By LF I mean \n and by CR I mean \r. Note that when you use the -b option the file will always be edited in UNIX mode by default as indicated by [unix] in the status line, meaning that if you add new lines they will end with LF, not CRLF. If you use normal vim without -b on a file with CRLF line endings, you should see [dos] shown in the status line and inserted lines will have CRLF as end of line. The vim documentation for fileformats setting explains the complexities.

Also, I don't have enough points to comment on the Notepad++ answer, but if you use Notepad++ on Windows, use the View / Show Symbol / Show End of Line menu to display CR and LF. In this case LF is shown whereas for vim the LF is indicated by a new line.

Answer 4

I dump my output to a text file. I then open it in notepad ++ then click the show all characters button. Not very elegant but it works.

Answer 5

Ubuntu 14.04:

simple cat -e <filename> works just fine.

This displays Unix line endings (\n or LF) as $ and Windows line endings (\r\n or CRLF) as ^M$.