You may ask yourself, what is the purpose of this article? Why convert a Windows file to adapt to a UNIX environment like Linux? Isn’t Linux all-powerful? The exceptional capabilities of the Linux operating system do not spare it from incompatible displays of files transferred from other computing platforms.
Just because you can open a file on a Linux environment does not imply that you have full control over how the file’s texts should be displayed.
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You will encounter instances where a file’s texts or words are jammed together on a single giant line. In other instances, the same file texts’ displays might not have line breaks or sentence spacing.
A common attribute of raw Windows files opened in UNIX systems like Linux is the unavoidable end-of-line display of ^M or Ctrl-M characters.
This article guide seeks to achieve one objective; the conversion of a Windows File to a UNIX file without changing the format of the resulting file.
Ways to Convert Windows File to Unix Format in Linux
We can achieve the objective of our article through several methods. These methods allow us to convert a Windows file to a UNIX file and still retain the original format of the Windows file.
Convert Windows File to Unix Using dos2unix Command
Depending on your Linux operating system distribution, you can install the dos2unix command-line tool from one of the following commands:
$ sudo apt-get install dos2unix [On Debian, Ubuntu and Mint] $ sudo yum install dos2unix [On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux] $ sudo emerge -a sys-apps/dos2unix [On Gentoo Linux] $ sudo pacman -S dos2unix [On Arch Linux] $ sudo zypper install dos2unix [On OpenSUSE]
The command syntax for using the dos2unix tool is as follows:
$ dos2unix Your_Windows_File Final_Unix_File
So if you have a sample file created on a Windows computing system and want to open it on a Linux computing system without compromising its format, you would use the following command.
$ dos2unix windows_readme.txt unix_readme.txt
Before we run the above command, we need to create a blank unix_readme.txt file that will accommodate the converted file.
$ touch unix_readme.txt $ dos2unix windows_readme.txt unix_readme.txt
As per the screen capture, your converted Windows file should comfortably adapt to any Unix environment.
Using AWK Command – Convert Windows File to Unix
The awk command is pre-installed on all modern full-fledged UNIX computing systems like Linux. To convert our sample Windows file, we would implement the awk command in the following manner:
$ awk '{ sub("\r$", ""); print }' windows_readme.txt > new_unix_readme.txt
As you have noted, with the awk command, we don’t need a pre-existing blank Linux file to accommodate the converted Windows file. The command creates and populates the Unix file version of the Windows file on its own.
Using tr Command – Convert Windows File to Unix
If most of the Windows files you open on your Linux environment have unnecessary Ctrl-Z and carriage return characters, then you will appreciate what the tr command has to offer.
Supposing our sample Windows file is a victim of such characters, removing them will require implementing the following command:
$ tr -d '' < windows_readme.txt > polished_unix_readme.txt
The inbuilt nature of the tr command also generates the resulting UNIX file without the need for its pre-creation.
The flexibility of the three discussed approaches to converting any editable Windows file to UNIX file format should save you from the headaches of having to manually edit your downloaded or transferred Windows files to remove unwanted characters and spaces while on a Linux environment.
