Regd the format of the file

[123jk]

Hi,

How do i check the format of the file.
I need to convert the ascii text files to unix format. That can be done through dos2unix command. But before conversion i actually need to check if the file is in dos format.

Is there a command to check the file format?

Regards
jaya

 

[KenCunningham]

You can check whether the file contains any ^M characters (DOS end-of-line chars) in vi or using grep (though the latter will only return a blank line if it does find anything, nothing if it doesn't), but I would question why you need to check this as if the file isn't in DOS format, dos2unix won't change anything anyway. Does this help?

 

[CaKiwi]

Try the

file

command. Ken, I think the reason 123jk wants to check the file first is in case it is a binary file which dos2unix would corrupt if it happened to have a crlf pair in it.

Hope this helps. CaKiwi

 

[toolkit]

Perl has a -T (text file) and -B (binary file) test, which makes a pretty good guess at the contents of the file.
See:

http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/func/X.html

Cheers, Neil

 

[KenCunningham]

CaKiwi - thanks, I'd not thought of that possibility, good catch. All that cricket no doubt! ;-)