Difference between CR LF, LF and CR line break types?

Question

I\'d like to know the difference (with examples if possible) between CR LF (Windows), LF (Unix) and CR (Macintosh) line break types.

Answer 1

The sad state of "record separators" or "line terminators" is a legacy of the dark ages of computing.

Now, we take it for granted that anything we want to represent is in some way structured data and conforms to various abstractions that define lines, files, protocols, messages, markup, whatever.

But once upon a time this wasn't exactly true. Applications built-in control characters and device-specific processing. The brain-dead systems that required both CR and LF simply had no abstraction for record separators or line terminators. The CR was necessary in order to get the teletype or video display to return to column one and the LF (today, NL, same code) was necessary to get it to advance to the next line. I guess the idea of doing something other than dumping the raw data to the device was too complex.

Unix and Mac actually specified an abstraction for the line end, imagine that. Sadly, they specified different ones. (Unix, ahem, came first.) And naturally, they used a control code that was already "close" to S.O.P.

Since almost all of our operating software today is a descendent of Unix, Mac, or MS operating SW, we are stuck with the line ending confusion.

Answer 2

NL derived from EBCDIC NL = x'15' which would logically compare to CRLF x'odoa ascii... this becomes evident when physcally moving data from mainframes to midrange. Coloquially (as only arcane folks use ebcdic) NL has been equated with either CR or LF or CRLF

Answer 3

CR and LF are control characters, respectively coded 0x0D (13 decimal) and 0x0A (10 decimal).

They are used to mark a line break in a text file. As you indicated, Windows uses two characters the CR LF sequence; Unix only uses LF and the old MacOS ( pre-OSX MacIntosh) used CR.

An apocryphal historical perspective:

As indicated by Peter, CR = Carriage Return and LF = Line Feed, two expressions have their roots in the old typewriters / TTY. LF moved the paper up (but kept the horizontal position identical) and CR brought back the "carriage" so that the next character typed would be at the leftmost position on the paper (but on the same line). CR+LF was doing both, i.e. preparing to type a new line. As time went by the physical semantics of the codes were not applicable, and as memory and floppy disk space were at a premium, some OS designers decided to only use one of the characters, they just didn't communicate very well with one another ;-)

Most modern text editors and text-oriented applications offer options/settings etc. that allow the automatic detection of the file's end-of-line convention and to display it accordingly.