Line Termination

Read a little about the different line termination characters used among various operating system platforms.

The exercise for you to perform:

Bring a diskette on which you have made a file using Notepad under Windows, containing one or two (very) short lines of text. It's best if each line is just one short word. To get access to your "Windows" file under linux, insert the diskette into the drive and mount it. Mounting integrates the diskette into your existing hierarchical filesystem somewhere (i.e., under some subdirectory within it). To read it, that's what it takes. Because you only have one filesystem-- unlike Windows where you can have several, distinguished with letters of the alphabet as names. Not here. So the new device (diskette) that has files on it needs to "enter" your one-and-only filesystem before its files can get accessed. That's called mounting.

The diskette drive goes by the name /dev/fd0. To mount it, try

mount -v /dev/fd0

If it mounts, it will give you the name of the subdirectory under which the files on the floppy now appear. Maybe /media/floppy1. Otherwise it will give you an error message. In that case it means it wasn't set up to know where to mount the floppy. You must mount it manually, that is, supply the name of a subdirectory under which to put its contents. Such a subdirectory is called a "mountpoint." Try

mount -v /dev/fd0 /media/floppy1

This should work provided that mountpoint subdirectory actually exists. If not, try

mount -v /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

By now your floppy is mounted, under one mountpoint or another. Change directory to that mountpoint (I'll assume /media/floppy1) and observe the presence of your file:

cd /media/floppy1
ls -l

Now run an editor. vi is good if you know it but I don't assume you do. So use the graphical gedit. To do so you'll need to launch the GUI if you are in character mode. "startx &" does the job. Once in the GUI access gedit and make a linux copy of your Windows file. That is, type in exactly the same stuff as you did previously in Notepad, and save the file. Save it into /media/floppy1-- it'll end up on the floppy, you'll hear the drive go.

Now do comparative runs of xxd on your two files. xxd is a hex dump utility. It shows you the value of every byte in your file.

xxd  -g1  <filename>

Run it twice, once on the file you made in Windows and again on the one you made in Linux. Hopefully your files are very brief and both outputs will fit on one screen. Scrutinize these and make sure you can identify the line separator characters that appear, and the difference between those in one file and those in the other. If you have any doubt what your looking at or what the point is, consult your classmates or instructor.