UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I've spent all of my career on windows boxes and maybe 30 secs here an there with unix.

Now I find myself with a project of migrating web files (html, swf, etc) from windows to unix. I know that unix is case sensitive and there can be no spaces in file/folder names.

What else do I need to be on the look out for? Is there documentation or a utility to help somewhere?

Thanks all!

> I've spent all of my career on windows boxes and maybe 30 secs here an there with unix.

First of all: Congratulations!
I am in an opposite situation: changed work recently and moved to windows-based environment. I feel like somone cut off my hands, you'll probably understand me very well :-)

Anyway let's get down to business.
Regarding all flavours of text files (including html files of course) there is a mojor difference that you should be aware off:
the famous "newline" character.
Windows writes newlines as CRLF (two characters: carriage-return and line-feed) while UNIX writes newlines simply as LF.

So when'll you copy files from windows system expect to see an extra character at the end of line (often seen as "^M").
The good news: there are 1001 ways to remove that unnecesary character: one of the best ways is to use dos2unix command.

There are other ways to get rid of this character: from manually editing the file (in fact it's just a character that has to be removed) to using simple perl one-liners (that is one-line long scripts) like:
perl -i -pe 's/\r//g' file.
There are also options for zip that fix newline issue depending on the target system, that is system where you intend tu un-zip.

I hope I was helpful at leas a little. bye

Some Unix filesystems can handle filenames that contain spaces.
dos2unix is a utility that might be available to you which does the line ending thing.