Version Control and Newline Conventions

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

There are two widely used conventions for representing the end of a line and the start of the next. Unix-like systems have traditionally used one character, \n (ASCII 10, "line feed"), while Microsoft DOS and Windows used a sequence \r\n (ASCII 13, "carriage return", \n). Being invisible, the difference of conventions usually goes unnoticed, specially because most modern software can correctly display text written with either one. However, there can be interoperability issues when using editors that follow different conventions.

Luis Zarrabeitia on The Carpentries

Version Control and Newline Conventions