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dos2unix

dos2unix

Section: 2010-08-18 (1) Updated: 2010-07-23 Local index Up
 

NAME

dos2unix - DOS/MAC to UNIX and vice versa text file format converter  

SYNOPSIS

    dos2unix [options] [-c CONVMODE] [-o FILE ...] [-n INFILE OUTFILE ...]
    unix2dos [options] [-c CONVMODE] [-o FILE ...] [-n INFILE OUTFILE ...]
 

DESCRIPTION

The Dos2unix package includes utilities "dos2unix" and "unix2dos" to convert plain text files in DOS or MAC format to UNIX format and vice versa. Binary files and non-regular files, such as soft links, are automatically skipped, unless conversion is forced.

Dos2unix has a few conversion modes similar to dos2unix under SunOS/Solaris.

In DOS/Windows text files line endings exist out of a combination of two characters: a Carriage Return (CR) followed by a Line Feed (LF). In Unix text files line endings exists out of a single Newline character which is equal to a DOS Line Feed (LF) character. In Mac text files, prior to Mac OS X, line endings exist out of a single Carriage Return character. Mac OS X is Unix based and has the same line endings as Unix.  

OPTIONS

-c, --convmode CONVMODE
Set conversion mode. Where CONVMODE is one of: ascii, 7bit, iso, mac with ascii being the default.
-f, --force
Force conversion of all files. Also binary files.
-h, --help
Display online help.
-k, --keepdate
Keep the date stamp of output file same as input file.
-L, --license
Display software license.
-l, --newline
Add additional newline.

dos2unix: Only DOS line endings are changed to two Unix line endings. In Mac mode only Mac line endings are changed to two Unix line endings.

unix2dos: Only Unix line endings are changed to two DOS line endings. In Mac mode Unix line endings are changed to two Mac line endings.

-n, --newfile INFILE OUTFILE ...
New file mode. Convert file INFILE and write output to file OUTFILE. File names must be given in pairs and wildcard names should NOT be used or you WILL lose your files.
-o, --oldfile FILE ...
Old file mode. Convert file FILE and overwrite output to it. The program default to run in this mode. Wildcard names may be used.
-q, --quiet
Quiet mode. Suppress all warning and messages.
-V, --version
Display version information.
 

CONVERSION MODES

Conversion modes ascii, 7bit, and iso are similar to those of dos2unix/unix2dos under SunOS/Solaris.
ascii
dos2unix: In this mode DOS line endings are converted to Unix line endings. Unix and Mac line endings are not changed.

unix2dos: In this mode Unix line endings are converted to DOS line endings. DOS and Mac line endings are not changed.

Although the name of this mode is ASCII, which is a 7 bit standard, the actual mode is 8 bit.

mac
dos2unix: In this mode Mac line endings are converted to Unix line endings. DOS and Unix line endigs are not changed. You can also use the command "mac2unix" to run dos2unix in Mac mode.

unix2dos: In this mode Unix line endings are converted to Mac line endings. DOS and Mac line endigs are not changed. You can also use the command "unix2mac" to run unix2dos in Mac mode.

7bit
In this mode DOS line endings are converted to Unix line endings or vice versa. All 8 bit non-ASCII characters (with values from 128 to 255) are converted to a space.
iso
In this mode DOS line endings are converted to Unix line endings or vice versa. Characters are converted between the DOS character set (code page) CP437 and ISO character set ISO-8859-1 on Unix. CP437 characters without ISO-8859-1 equivalent, for which conversion is not possible, are converted to a dot. The same counts for ISO-8859-1 characters without CP437 counterpart. CP437 is mainly used in the USA. In Western Europe CP850 is more standard.

Another option to convert text files between different encodings is to use dos2unix in combination with iconv(1). Iconv can convert between a long list of character encodings. Some examples:

Convert from DOS DOSLatinUS to Unix Latin-1 

    iconv -f CP437 -t ISO-8859-1 in.txt | dos2unix > out.txt

Convert from DOS DOSLatin1 to Unix Latin-1 

    iconv -f CP850 -t ISO-8859-1 in.txt | dos2unix > out.txt

Convert from Windows WinLatin1 to Unix Latin-1 

    iconv -f CP1252 -t ISO-8859-1 in.txt | dos2unix > out.txt

Convert from Windows WinLatin1 to Unix UTF-8 (Unicode) 

    iconv -f CP1252 -t UTF-8 in.txt | dos2unix > out.txt

Convert from Windows UTF-16 (Unicode) to Unix UTF-8 (Unicode) 

    iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 in.txt | dos2unix > out.txt

Convert from Unix Latin-1 to DOS DOSLatinUS 

    unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t CP437 > out.txt

Convert from Unix Latin-1 to DOS DOSLatin1 

    unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t CP850 > out.txt

Convert from Unix Latin-1 to Windows WinLatin1 

    unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t CP1252 > out.txt

Convert from Unix UTF-8 (Unicode) to Windows WinLatin1 

    unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f UTF-8 -t CP1252 > out.txt

Convert from Unix UTF-8 (Unicode) to Windows UTF-16 (Unicode) 

    unix2dos < in.txt | iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-16 > out.txt

See also <http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html> and <http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html>.

 

UNICODE

There exist different Unicode encodings. On Unix/Linux Unicode files are mostly encoded in UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 is ASCII compatible. UTF-8 files can have DOS, Unix or Mac line endings. It is safe to run dos2unix/unix2dos on UTF-8 encoded files. On Windows mostly UTF-16 encoding is used for Unicode files. Dos2unix/unix2dos should not be run on UTF-16 files. UTF-16 files are automatically skipped, because it are binary files.  

EXAMPLES

Read input from 'stdin' and write output to 'stdout'. 

    dos2unix
    dos2unix -l -c mac

Convert and replace a.txt. Convert and replace b.txt. 

    dos2unix a.txt b.txt
    dos2unix -o a.txt b.txt

Convert and replace a.txt in ascii conversion mode. 

    dos2unix a.txt

Convert and replace a.txt in ascii conversion mode. Convert and replace b.txt in 7bit conversion mode. 

    dos2unix a.txt -c 7bit b.txt
    dos2unix -c ascii a.txt -c 7bit b.txt

Convert a.txt from Mac to Unix format. 

    dos2unix -c mac a.txt
    mac2unix a.txt

Convert a.txt from Unix to Mac format. 

    unix2dos -c mac a.txt
    unix2mac a.txt

Convert and replace a.txt while keeping original date stamp. 

    dos2unix -k a.txt
    dos2unix -k -o a.txt

Convert a.txt and write to e.txt. 

    dos2unix -n a.txt e.txt

Convert a.txt and write to e.txt, keep date stamp of e.txt same as a.txt. 

    dos2unix -k -n a.txt e.txt

Convert and replace a.txt. Convert b.txt and write to e.txt. 

    dos2unix a.txt -n b.txt e.txt
    dos2unix -o a.txt -n b.txt e.txt

Convert c.txt and write to e.txt. Convert and replace a.txt. Convert and replace b.txt. Convert d.txt and write to f.txt. 

    dos2unix -n c.txt e.txt -o a.txt b.txt -n d.txt f.txt
 

LOCALIZATION

LANG
The primary language is selected with the environment variable LANG. The LANG variable consists out of several parts. The first part is in small letters the language code. The second is optional and is the country code in capital letters, preceded with an underscore. There is also an optional third part: character encoding, preceded with a dot. A few examples for POSIX standard type shells: 

    export LANG=nl               Dutch
    export LANG=nl_NL            Dutch, The Netherlands
    export LANG=nl_BE            Dutch, Belgium
    export LANG=es_ES            Spanish, Spain
    export LANG=es_MX            Spanish, Mexico
    export LANG=en_US.iso88591   English, USA, Latin-1 encoding
    export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8      English, UK, UTF-8 encoding

For a complete list of language and country codes see the gettext manual: <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Language-Codes>

On Unix systems you can use to command locale(1) to get locale specific information.

LANGUAGE
With the LANGUAGE environment variable you can specify a priority list of languages, separated by colons. Dos2unix gives preference to LANGUAGE over LANG. For instance, first Dutch and then German: "LANGUAGE=nl:de". You have to first enable localization, by setting LANG (or LC_ALL) to a value other than ``C'', before you can use a language priority list through the LANGUAGE variable. See also the gettext manual: <http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#The-LANGUAGE-variable>

For Esperanto there is a special language file in x-method format. X-method can be used on systems that don't support Latin-3 or Unicode character encoding. Make LANGUAGE equal to ``eo-x:eo''.

If you select a language which is not available you will get the standard English messages.

DOS2UNIX_LOCALEDIR
With the environment variable DOS2UNIX_LOCALEDIR the LOCALEDIR set during compilation can be overruled. LOCALEDIR is used to find the language files. The GNU default value is "/usr/local/share/locale". Option ``-V'' will display the LOCALEDIR that is used.

Example (Windows Command Prompt): 

    set DOS2UNIX_LOCALEDIR=c:/my_prefix/share/locale
 

AUTHORS

Benjamin Lin - <blin@socs.uts.edu.au>

Bernd Johannes Wuebben (mac2unix mode) - <wuebben@kde.org>

Erwin Waterlander - <waterlan@xs4all.nl>

Project page: <http://www.xs4all.nl/~waterlan/dos2unix.html>

SourceForge page: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/dos2unix/>

Freshmeat: <http://freshmeat.net/projects/dos2unix>  

SEE ALSO

iconv(1)

 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
CONVERSION MODES
UNICODE
EXAMPLES
LOCALIZATION
AUTHORS
SEE ALSO
This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 21:14:45 GMT, April 16, 2011