Converting DOS text to Linux text and vice versa

This is a strange idea – you might have thought a .txt file is a .txt file, right? Wrong.

There are subtle differences between .txt file formats in DOS/Windows and Linux. Sometimes, those differences can make you mad in a matter of seconds. We've had our fair share of experiences of that – scripts not working as input files were prepared on Windows, not on Linux; different treatment of CSV files in Excel by design... sometimes it's just too funny when, after hours of deliberation, you realize that something as simple as a .txt file created on another OS can make such a mess. Let's explain what the problem is and work through it.

Getting ready

We just need one Ubuntu machine for this recipe. Let's say we are going to continue using cli1 to master these commands. Furthermore, we need to install one package, called dos2unix. So, if we are using cli1 (Ubuntu), we need to type in the following command...