2.1. Text Nuances

Tabs and Whitespace

• There is a special character called "Tab" whose ASCII value is 9. It is usually displayed as several adjacent whitespace characters.
• In some file-types (most notably Makefiles) tabs have a special meaning and cannot be substituted with their equivalent whitespaces.
• They would even reject a whitespace before the tab. (which often looks identical to a tab).
• Thus it is important to make sure your editor is configured so it inputs tabs at such files.

Carriage Returns

• On Linux and other UNIX systems, the lines of text files are terminate with a single character called "Newline" or "Linefeed".
• In DOS, and Windows, the Linefeed character is preceded by another character called Carriage Return.
• The problem is that some Linux tools will not tolerate CRs at the end of lines, so they have to be removed somehow.
• You can use the following command: perl -pi -e 's/\r$//' [files] to convert files from DOS-style to Windows-style.