Fun with line endings (or not)

[Paula]

As of July 22nd: I am in the process of documenting Adiabat_1ph 3 so that it may be released very soon. To that end I am posting some tips and examples etc....

In Linux / Unix, line endings are marked by the 'Line Feed' character (ASCII character 10; '\n'). On Macintosh computers, line endings have traditionally been denoted with the 'Carriage Return' character (ASCII character 13; '\r'; sometimes displays as '^M' or a small box). Windows computers use a 'Carriage Return' followed immediately by a 'Line Feed'.

The situation was further complicated with the introduction of Mac OS X as this is a form of Unix and, within the 'Terminal' program, it uses the Unix line-endings; so in earlier versions it was possible for adiabat_1ph and / or run_adiabat.pl to not work correctly, even though they were running on the same machine used to edit the input files. Newer versions of Microsoft Word for Mac give detailed line-ending options when saving as plain text and the free command line editor Nano, which is installed by default on Mac OS X, is also line-ending aware.

Adiabat_1ph and run_adiabat.command should tolerate incorrect line endings on most of their input files but there could well be exceptions. Some of the other scripts, e.g. column_pick.command, will warn if a file appears to have the wrong line endings. But if you seem to be getting random errors with input it's worth running file_format.command on all the text files you are using.

Paula