Get your compilers ready

The next two suggestions are for binaries, one from the GNU project and one do-it-yourself job.

Jean Sebastien Monzani writes:

Regarding your article on Cross Platform Text Conversions in Linux Gazette, I suggest you to have a look at a program called "recode", that perfectly does this kind of job for many, many platforms : 150 different formats are supported :-) !

Sounds like a great program. I'd think something like this would be standard with Linux distributions. Redhat, at least, doesn't include it by default, though an RPM is available in their Contrib archives. Source code can be found at GNU software archives.

Visit gnu.org's list of GNU download sites

Real hackers may want to try this one from Paul Anderson.

Actually, when I ran into something like that, (being a C programmer) I used flex for the job. Create a file(say, u2d.y) like so:

        %%
        ^M                    printf("");
        %%
	      

Now, run:

        flex u2d.y
        gcc lex.yy.c -o u2d -lfl
	      

And you'll have a binary that'll convert DOS to UNIX text files. Remember, the ^M has to be a REAL CTRL-M. TTYL!

Next: How-to 4 -- text editor methods