Hi! I'm writing a backup script that creates an index (in a text file) of all the files that have been backed up. The problem I have is that when this file is opened on Windows with notepad (or other wordprocessors), it combines different lines together and uses some strange characters to replace newline. I would appreciate if I can get any useful links or some help on how to retain the structure of the file i.e. it should show the same way it would on my Linux.

SAMPLE:
On my linux machine
$ cat index_file.txt
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/01_track_01.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/04_track_04.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/05_track_05.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/02_track_02.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/03_track_03.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/09_track_09.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/10_track_10.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/06_track_06.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/07_track_07.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/08_track_08.mp3
/home/ayo/mp3/david_lanz/classical_jazz/11_track_11.mp3

On windows, it joins most of the lines together and replaces the newline with funny boxes.

Windows uses different end of line characters for text files. Linux 0x0a and windows a 0xa,0x0d. Without the 0x0d the text appears to be all on one line. Wordpad will display a linux text file correctly. unix2dos and dos2unix are linux utilities to convert between the two formats. The windows shareware textpad application is an excellent ASCII text editor that can open and save files in both formats.

I transfer files to windows frequently using the program 'zip' which does assignment of ascii file types.

For example:

find somefiles_that_are_ascii | zip transferme.zip -l -@
find somefiles_that_are_binary | zip transferme.zip -@

This gives a zip file that will decompress on windows correctly. (-l option means to extract asciii format).

Regards,
T

Thanks for your help. Unix2dos works perfectly with what I want. I really appreciate your help. Thanks once again

todos fromdos works also if you distro has those cmds.