A few months ago, I was faced with a need to convert some text files from UNIX format to DOS. But the only conversion program I could find in the Linux archives was in a.out format , which wouldn't run on my system.

If it had been just one file, I could have dealt with it easily enough by opening it in my editor and adding ^M's at the end of every line. But I anticipated a need to convert quite a few files in the future, so I thought a batch processing approach would save a lot of work.

I wrote a Tcl script to do the job, and posted it to the Linux Gazette. After that, several people contacted me to suggest alternative methods. Since it seems to be a problem that comes up now and then for many people, I've gathered together the various ideas and posted them on the following pages.