UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Forum
I have a tab delimited file that opens well in Openoffice calc (excel). But when I perform any operation in command line, it reads the file incorrectly. When I 'save As' the same file in office as tab delimited then it works fine.

The file that I think is tab delimited is actually not the same according to unix/linux bash/sh script.

What may be the reason. My dummy guess is that there may be embedded space in between.

Which command do I use to make this file unix compatible tab delimted file.
Thanks

Post output of:

Code:

cat -Te your.file | head

Code:

$ cat -Te  1327.txt | head
country^Iyear^IQty^M$
Japan^I961^I303^M$
Japan^I996^I5021^M$
Japan^I608^I2633^M$
USA^I620^I645^M$
USA^I437^I62^M$
Japan^I565^I90^M$
UK^I705^I730^M$
Japan^I5794^I819^M$
Japan^I890^I5915^M$

Code:

$ cat -Te  1327.txt | head
country^Iyear^IQty^M$
Japan^I961^I303^M$
Japan^I996^I5021^M$
Japan^I608^I2633^M$
USA^I620^I645^M$
USA^I437^I62^M$
Japan^I565^I90^M$
UK^I705^I730^M$
Japan^I5794^I819^M$
Japan^I890^I5915^M$

looks like the file is using windows line endings. can you save as ascii? try converting the file to ascii.

You can use "dos2unix" tool to convert Windows style newlines to Unix:

Code:

dos2unix 1327.txt > 1327-converted.txt

Try running your command line tools/scripts on the resulting file.

I am working in linux and has nothing to do with windows. I used to generate these files using php. Is the php code culprit for this? I opened the same file in gedit and changed the saving parameter "line ending" from "Windows" to "unix" and worked.
Frank_rizzo and bartus11, thanks.
Is there a way to determine if it is windows file and if it is so then apply some method to convert it as I have large number of files.

Thanks