Appending 2 text files - Problem in windows

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello,

I have text files to append and am able to do with cat.

cat file1 file2 >file3

and file3 works fine in UNIX (checked with vi and it looks fine) but when i open the same file in windows I see 2nd file appended as a single-line. In other words, all the lines of 2nd file appended to first file as single-line.

As I need to process that file in windows, could any please suggest how to fix this problem? perhaps I should add LR+LF every line??

I also tried line-by-line append of 2nd file to 1st file but no luck.

TIA

2

Yes, Windows uses CR-LF (Carriage Return - Linefeed) to terminate a line and Unix uses LF. So in order to process a windows file on Unix in most cases the CR should be removed before processing. If the result needs to be used on a Windows platform the CR needs to be added again before every LF.

To remove the CR:

tr -d '\r' < file

To add the CR:

awk 1 ORS='\r\n'

For an all in one command, resulting in a CR-LF version, try:

awk '{print $1}' FS='\r' ORS='\r\n' file1 file2 > file3

or better:

awk '{sub(/\r$/,x)}1' ORS='\r\n' file1 file2 > file3

or without converting first:

awk '{sub(/\r?$/,"\r")}1' file1 file2 > file3
3

In addition, you might also be interested in the unix2dos and dos2unix utilities.