UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,
I am working off of a MacBook Pro OSx 10.5.8.
I have a tab deliminted text file on my desktop that I created in excel. It has 4 columns and 20,000 rows. When I scroll down it in excel, everything lines up perfectly, and is where it is supposed to be. After copying it into my terminal directory however, the text file looks messed up (ie. column/row values switch places, only see partial names in rows), and the script I run (created specifically for these txt files) on it doesnt work. Can anyone tell me why it gets messeed up during the transfer to my terminal, and how to fix it?

This is how I transfer it:

Code:

lrae-macbook-pro:~ lrae$ cd ./Desktop/
lrae-macbook-pro:Desktop lrae$ sftp lrae@ssh.institution.ca
Connecting to ssh.institution.ca...
lrae@ssh.institution.ca's password: 
sftp> cd /home/lrae/file/
sftp> put textfile.txt
Uploading textfile.txt to /home/lrae/file/textfile.txt
textfile.txt     100%  371KB 370.7KB/s   00:01    
sftp>

Any help is greatly apprciated.

First try the ftp "ascii" command just before issuing the ftp "put" command.

Thank you for your quick response. I am unfamiliar with the ascii command. I tried it though, and got an error of "invalid command".
Was this what you meant for me to do? ...
sftp> ascii put textfile.txt
Invalid command.

sftp> ascii
Invalid command.

sftp always transfers in binary mode, it has no ASCII translation mode. Which is unfortunate since this is one of the rare times when an ASCII translation mode would be useful instead of annoying.

The file isn't actually being mangled. Windows just demands CPM-style text files with CR-LF instead of the plain CR UNIX text files use.

You can translate a file from UNIX cr's into Windows CR-LF's in OSX with

Code:

 awk '{ print $0 "\r" }' < infile > outfile

Usually you can use sed 's/$/\r/' < infile > outfile but OSX's ridiculously old sed doesn't support \r. Some systems also have dos2unix and unix2dos text translation utilities.

So I tried that, and now nothing is being returned. Even when I try to run my script on it, nothing is returned. Can you tell me why this is?

Code:

{xhost}~/home/lrae/file> awk '{ print $0 "\r" }' < filename.txt > filename.txt 
{xhost}~/home/lrae/file> more filename.txt 
{xhost}~/home/lrae/file> cat filename.txt
{xhost}~/home/lrae/file> script.pl filename.txt 
{xhost}~/home/lrae/file>

Because > truncates your file, and the shell does this before awk is even run. You can't redirect into and from the same file simultaneously, it just doesn't work.

Thanks so much Corona688 and Methyl. I have figured out this mess. It turns out that it was a very simple fix. I just had it saved as the wrong type of txt file. I needed to save it as a txt (Windows Formatted Text) file type on the Desktop. That way, it is correctly formatted to be loaded up into my terminal directory.
thanks again