linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Terminal

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Terminal

Hi Bart,

You wrote:

At one point, I was wondering if there was some sort of haiku fad going on among users. But here, I see a pretty strong 40 character line. Are people still using picture tube television sets as monitors?

Bart

I wrote:

Hi All,

I've been digging into the beginning of
Mark Sobell's book on Linux Terminal
Commands.

No fad or Haiku intended--it's just my
way of dodging display width variations
I've encountered in the past. Certainly
I don't have a problem reading email on
this MacBookPro using Thunderbird as
a client.

In my experience, lots of it ancient, not
all email clients have done a smooth job
of wrapping lines. Screen width still does
vary some and although I don't use ipods
or cell phones to web surf, some do. I'm
also suspecting some users do use good
old CRT technology. FWIW my computer
at work is a hand-me-down from front
office upgrades and, until recently, I had
a CRT monitor for intranet email.

An aspect of what I've encountered is that,
if one chooses to use the return key to
end a line, a short line is needed for the
in-between widths or it's really weird
looking.

Since the experts (at least those who make
that claim) say a narrow column is easier
to read, I haven't been too anxious to go
back to depending on the line-wrap.

I see the commands unix2dos and
unix2mac discussed as being used to
convert files created in Linux to the
formats for Windows or Macintosh.
dos2unix is mentioned to go the
other way. The example given is
for .txt files.

I have been "ignorantly" moving .txt,
.htm, and .pdf files back and forth
between the three computer OSs and
I have not had any problems using
them.

What does this command category
do?