endline characters

[Maynard Wright]

In days of yore, Unix used a single line feed (0A hex) to terminate a line of 
text and DOS used a carriage return - line feed pair (OD hex 0A hex).  When 
moving files back and forth between the two systems, it was often necessary 
to convert the endline (sometimes called "newline") characters one way or the 
other.

This situation seemed to prevail through RedHat 8 (LF) and W98SE (CR-LF).  In 
attempting to resolve some issues involved with porting code from Linux to 
Windows XP, I see that the situation seems to have been reversed.  Although 
Kate under RH8 defaulted to LF endlines, Kate under Dapper defaults to CR-LF.  
Conversely, a file edited by Notepad under Windows XP and emailed to me (I 
don't have any OS other than Linux anymore) used only LF endlines.

Although I haven't found a definitive commentary on this aspect of Windows, a 
Google search seems to indicate that up through W98SE, Microsoft OS used 
CR-LF, but that OS since that version, including XP, use LF as an endline 
character.

Any thoughts or further information on this?


Thanks,

Maynard