How To Convert Files from Linux/Unix Format to Windows and Vice Versa

If you’ve ever transferred a text file from a UNIX based system to a Windows system directly, you know that when you open the text file on the Windows system, it is usually not displayed correctly. Windows based text reader programs (like Notepad) may not be able to display the text. In most cases, when you open the text file, all the words get displayed on a single giant line, without any breaks. This is because there is a slight difference in the way a text document is written (and read) on Windows and UNIX.

If a file was written on a Windows based system and is opened by a text editor on a UNIX system, it is very common for the “Ctrl-M” characters (^M) to be displayed at the end of each line of text. If a file was written on a UNIX system and opened by a text editor on a Windows system, the line break character (EOL) may not be displayed correctly. The carriage return character is also different for both UNIX and Windows.

While dealing with files, you don’t want to be limited by whether the file was created on Linux or Windows. So how do you convert a file from UNIX to Windows (or vice versa) without having the formatting go all crazy? We’ll walk you through the steps.

Converting Files from Linux/UNIX format to Windows Format

If you’re using a UNIX based system to transfer the files to a Windows system, there are some commands that let you convert the text file(s) you are transferring to a format Windows can understand.

The dos2unix and unix2dos command

You can use command line to safely convert files from UNIX to Windows and vice versa. To convert a Windows text file to a UNIX text file, enter this:

The above command converts and replaces “windows.txt” file to “unix.txt”. To convert a UNIX text file to a Windows text file, enter this command:

The above command will convert a UNIX created text file called “unix.txt” to a Windows compatible text file called “windows.txt”.

The awk command

The awk command also lets you convert a file from UNIX to Windows and vice versa. To convert a Windows file to a UNIX file, enter the following command:

To convert a UNIX text file called “unix.txt” to a Windows text file called “windows.txt”, enter the following command:

The tr command

The tr command (transliterate) can be used to remove the carriage return characters and the “Ctrl-Z” characters from a Windows file. This can only be done if you are converting a file from Windows to UNIX. The command will be written as follows:

The tr command transliterates one character with another. In this case, it is helping you omit unnecessary characters.

Using the Visual Editor (Vi)

If you are using the Visual Editor to view a file created on a Windows system, you can remove the carriage return characters by typing the following command line:

To get the computer to input the ^M character, you need to hit “Ctrl + v” and then press Return.

Using File Transfer Protocol Programs

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) programs are available both for UNIX and Windows system. If you need to convert a lot of files from Windows to UNIX (or the other way around), then it’s a good idea to download a FTP program. There are many available for free on the Internet. The Hummingbird FTP is one of the more popular FTP programs out there. It is secure and easy to use.

Most FTP programs will transfer files from UNIX to Windows in the ASCII format. Sometimes you have to specify the format for yourself (if you are using command line based FTP programs). To do that, just enter this in the command line:

Conclusion

The easiest way to convert a file from a UNIX format to Windows (and the other way around) is to use an FTP program. The conversion commands are your next best bet. If you are looking for additional commands that perform the same task, you can search for perl and sed commands. However, do keep in mind that these commands may not work across all systems.

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Copy file from Windows shared folder to Unix

I am totally new to Unix. I am writting a script which will copy files from a Windows shared folder to Unix.

In Windows, when I type \\Servername.com\testfolder in Run command I am able to see testfolder . The directory testfolder is a shared folder through the whole network.

Now I want to copy some files from that testfolder to a Unix machine. Which command should I use? I know the IP Address of server but I don’t know the username.

3 Answers 3

From your UNIX server you need to mount the Windows share using the procedure laid out in this link.

Basically you create a directory on your UNIX machine that is called the mount point. You then use the mount command to mount the Windows share on that mount point. Then when you go to the directory that you have created you see the files that are in the Windows share.

With smbclient installed on the *nix machine, you don’t need to mount the Windows share at all. For example, to retrieve C:\Directory\file.txt and copy it to /tmp on your Linux computer do this:

See https://superuser.com/a/562728/48742 for details. This was discussed over there.

If you can see \Servername.com\testfolder in Windows machine, then you can use your own username and password.

On a linux machine, you can use

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=YourWindowsLogin,password=YourWindowsPassword //Servername.com/testfolder /mnt/testfolder

/mnt/testfolder must exist beforehand.

Then you can copy file from /mnt/testfolder .

Use sudo umount /mnt/testfolder to unmount the folder.

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How to Convert Windows/DOS Text Files to Linux/UNIX Format

October 26, 2010 by Ubuntu Genius

A Quick Intro to End-Of-Line

Most people don’t realise that when they hit the Enter key to create a new paragraph in a text file, something very different is going on behind the scenes in the three major operating systems: Windows , Macintosh and Linux . The “end-of-line delimiter” (often expressed as “End-Of-Line“, “End of Line“, or just “EOL“) – which some of you know as the “line break” or “newline” – is a special character used to designate the end of a line within a text file .

UNIX -based operating systems (like all Linux distros and BSD derivatives) use the line feed character ( \n or ), “classic” Mac OS uses a carriage return ( \r or ), while DOS/Windows uses a carriage return followed by a line feed ( \r\n or ). Now that Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD‘s file system, it follows the UNIX convention.

Now, the reason most people don’t know about all this is because nobody really should have to. But while users of Linux distros and Mac OS can open Windows text files in basically any available editor and not even know the difference, the same can’t be said for Windows users opening files created in one of the other operating systems.

If you type up a simple text file in Ubuntu and save it in the default “ Unix/Linux ” format, in Windows it will appear as one continuous paragraph, with black squares where the line breaks (or new paragraphs) should be. While you can open the file in a more advanced text editor (or proper word processor) to view it as it should look, others you’ve sent it to are just likely to double-click it and let it open in Notepad (which can only handle MS-DOS EOL).

Occasionally, the reverse is the issue, but you can convert Windows text files to UNIX easily with Gedit , as well as convert them via the terminal, so hopefully the following guide will be of use.

For more detailed info on End-Of-Line , go to the Wikipedia page.

Converting Windows EOL to Linux via the Terminal

If you find the text editor you’re using to display Windows files in Ubuntu shows ^M instead of a line break (not very likely with even the most lightweight text editors, but something you’ll probably come across if you display the text in a terminal), don’t worry – just convert them to Unix/Linux format.

While you can actually open them in Gedit and use Save As… to save over them (or to create copies) in the correct format, for more than a couple of files this would be the long, complicated solution.

By far the quickest and easiest approach is to convert the offending files via the command-line. This way, you could batch-convert hundreds of such files at once, not have to do them individually.
There are actually quite a few ways to do this, but we’ll look at a couple of tiny packages you can install, and the related commands to use.

The first – the tofrodos package – is undoubtedly the most widely-used, so we’ll look at that in detail – especially since many of the guides out there are outdated, since the commands it contains have been renamed.

The second is a little package called flip , and since it’s tiny and won’t cause any issues, it’s worth installing as a backup (just in case. I found it useful after trying to get tofrodos going on a new system, before I found out the commands were changed).

There is no actual command tofrodos , as it is just the package that contains the commands todos and fromdos . Currently, the vast majority of online guides will list the commands as unix2dos and dos2unix , but as the developer states:

With this release the symlinks “unix2dos” and “dos2unix” are dropped from the package. This will allow the introduction of the original dos2unix package, which also supports conversion to MacOS style files.

So now you can choose to use either todos (to convert to Windows ) and fromdos (to convert to Linux ), or just fromdos with options ( fromdos -u to convert to DOS , and fromdos -d to convert to UNIX , though obviously the -d option really isn’t needed, as it is the default behaviour for the fromdos command).

We’ll use fromdos , as it is easier to remember, and show how to alter a single file, or all text files in a given folder. When you’re ready to proceed, open a terminal in the folder containing the text file(s) and use one of the following commands (note that for the purpose of illustration, the .txt suffix is used, but you can specify any other extension for your text files).

To Convert to UNIX/Linux via Terminal :

Single file (remember to replace filename.txt with the actual name of the file)

fromdos filename.txt

All text files in a folder (if the extension differs to .txt, simply replace it in the command)

fromdos *.txt

Similarly, flip is easy to use:

flip -u filename.txt (or flip -u *.txt for multiple files)

Converting Windows EOL to Linux with Gedit

It’s actually very easy to convert text files with Windows EOL to Unix/Linux in Ubuntu using the default Text Editor , Gedit . Simply open the files, choose Save As…, go to Line Ending in the dialogue box and choose Unix/Linux instead of Windows . While that is easy enough, for more than one or two you’d really want to save yourself some time and hassle and perform a batch-conversion via the terminal.

Did this information make your day? Did it rescue you from hours of headache? Then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or some fish’n’chips for my time and effort! Many thanks!

How to convert Windows end of line in Unix end of line (CR/LF to LF)

I’m a Java developer and I’m using Ubuntu to develop. The project was created in Windows with Eclipse and it’s using the Windows-1252 encoding.

To convert to UTF-8 I’ve used the recode program:

This command gives this error:

Convert line endings from CR/LF to a single LF: Edit the file with Vim, give the command :set ff=unix and save the file. Recode now should run without errors.

Nice, but I’ve many files to remove the CR/LF character from, and I can’t open each to do it. Vi doesn’t provide any option to command line for Bash operations.

Can sed be used to do this? How?

8 Answers 8

There should be a program called dos2unix that will fix line endings for you. If it’s not already on your Linux box, it should be available via the package manager.

sed cannot match \n because the trailing newline is removed before the line is put into the pattern space, but it can match \r , so you can convert \r\n (DOS) to \n (Unix) by removing \r:

Warning: this will change the original file

However, you cannot change from Unix EOL to DOS or old Mac ( \r ) by this. More readings here:

Actually, Vim does allow what you’re looking for. Enter Vim, and type the following commands:

The first of these commands sets the argument list to every file matching **/*.java , which is all Java files, recursively. The second of these commands does the following to each file in the argument list, in turn:

• Sets the line-endings to Unix style (you already know this)
• Writes the file out iff it’s been changed
• Proceeds to the next file

The tr command can also do this:

and should be available to you.

You’ll need to run tr from within a script, since it cannot work with file names. For example, create a file myscript.sh:

Running myscript.sh would process all the java files in the current directory and its subdirectories.

I’ll take a little exception to jichao’s answer. You can actually do everything he just talked about fairly easily. Instead of looking for a \n , just look for carriage return at the end of the line.

To change from Unix back to DOS, simply look for the last character on the line and add a form feed to it. (I’ll add -r to make this easier with grep regular expressions.)

Theoretically, the file could be changed to Mac style by adding code to the last example that also appends the next line of input to the first line until all lines have been processed. I won’t try to make that example here, though.

Warning: -i changes the actual file. If you want a backup to be made, add a string of characters after -i . This will move the existing file to a file with the same name with your characters added to the end.