View 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 interrupted. The file is a dump from SSIS/SQL Server being read in by a Linux machine for processing.

Is there any switches within vi, less, more, etc?

In addition to seeing the line-endings, I need to know what type of line end it is (CRLF or LF).

Answer 1

In vi...

:set list to see line-endings.

:set nolist to go back to normal.

While I don't think you can see \n or \r\n in vi, you can see which type of file it is (UNIX, DOS, etc.) to infer which line endings it has...

:set ff

Answer 2

In the bash shell, try cat -v <filename>. This should display carriage-returns for windows files.

(This worked for me in rxvt via Cygwin on Windows XP).

Answer 3

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.