RE: FN-FORUM: formmail (why do we use it?)

date posted 13th June 2003 20:58

Lindsey Hill:
> Quite often editors put extra tags on the end of lines don't they?


Unlike end-of-file, there's no ASCII character for end-of-line. What there
*is* is carriage-return (ASCII 13, ^M, \r) and line-feed (ASCII 10, ^J, \n),
both of which seem to have been named back when people still used
typewriters. MS-DOS and Windows treat these terms literally, so a CR
literally moves the cursor to the left hand end of the current row, and LF
literally moves the cursor down one line; hence the end-of-line sequence for
Windows is \r\n.
Unix-alikes use \n only for some reason, and Macs use \r only for some other
reason.


- Nick Grimshaw
{ if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. }