Where's dos2unix? In Ubuntu's tofrodos package!

I had a strange error recently to do with a bash script not running correctly. I couldn't see anything wrong with the file until I noticed that VIM was reporting that the file's type was DOS.

What I needed was to convert the downloaded file to UNIX file format using dos2unix but which package does it live in? A quick search of the Ubuntu packages database revealed tofrodos:

Converts DOS <-> Unix text files, alias tofromdos

DOS text files traditionally have CR/LF (carriage return/line feed) pairs as their new line delimiters while Unix text files traditionally have LFs (line feeds) to terminate each line.

Tofrodos comprises one program, "fromdos" alias "todos", which converts text files to and from these formats. Use "fromdos" to convert DOS text files to the Unix format, and "todos" to convert Unix text files to the DOS format.

This functionality is also available via the dos2unix/unix2dos symlinks.
To install it run:
sudo aptitude install tofrodos
And then use dos2unix and unix2dos to convert the file between the two different formats.

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6 Comments:

jusuchin85 said...

Thanks!

Been looking for this for my assignments. Now that I found it, I can conveniently do the conversion at home.

Thanks again!

abeacock said...

Happy to help jusuchin85!

ricgal said...

Is that a command line tool I would use in Konsole

ricgal said...

Just to check, is this a command line utility to use in Konsole?

I know, silly question, but I deal with so many basic tech support questions every day that I always need the silly specifics :)

ricgal said...

sorry for the double post. Somehow after I logged in I didn't realize that it had not lost my original post

abeacock said...

ricgal, yes it's a command line program. And no it's not a silly question! :)