I'm working on a mac, with some fairly old files. Different files were created by different programs, so some of them end with \r (mac) and some with \n (unix). I want to be able to run commands like diff, grep, etc on these files, but the ones that have \r are treated as one giant line. does anyone know of a version of diff, grep, etc that will work correctly with all new-lines?
ETA: I'd also like them to be unix utilities so I can use them in scripts, emacs, etc...
If you use diff -w it will ignore whitespace in the files, which is probably sufficient for your needs.
EDIT: just realized I misread the post the first time and you're actually looking for a diff that will work with \r line endings. My suggestion would be to convert the files with something like flip that can convert the files to a \n standard format.
EDIT 2: Just found something that looks like what you want - Diff'nPatch:
Diff'nPatch is a port to the Macintosh of the GNU 'diff', 'patch' and 'cmp' utilities. It lets you compare and find differences between two files or folders, collate two files, generate diffs in various formats (normal, context, unidiff, etc.), apply patches, compare files byte by byte. It can handle any type of line endings (mac, unix or windows)
The dos2unix command could be helpful in converting your files to a consistent format first. I believe it's available for just about every platform you can think of and can run on lots of files at once. I believe there's a package available for mac.
As Jay said, Diff'nPatch seems what you are looking for. Alternatively you can convert all your '\r' line endings in '\n' in a single command like this:
sed -ie 's/\r/\n/' filename
or
find . | xargs -n1 sed -ie 's/\r/\n/'
(You may want to filter the list of files in some way in the latter case or it will be applied to all the files in all subdirectories.)