Difference between CR LF, LF and CR line break types?

Question

I\'d like to know the difference (with examples if possible) between CR LF (Windows), LF (Unix) and CR (Macintosh) line break types.

Answer 1

The sad state of "record separators" or "line terminators" is a legacy of the dark ages of computing.

Now, we take it for granted that anything we want to represent is in some way structured data and conforms to various abstractions that define lines, files, protocols, messages, markup, whatever.

But once upon a time this wasn't exactly true. Applications built-in control characters and device-specific processing. The brain-dead systems that required both CR and LF simply had no abstraction for record separators or line terminators. The CR was necessary in order to get the teletype or video display to return to column one and the LF (today, NL, same code) was necessary to get it to advance to the next line. I guess the idea of doing something other than dumping the raw data to the device was too complex.

Unix and Mac actually specified an abstraction for the line end, imagine that. Sadly, they specified different ones. (Unix, ahem, came first.) And naturally, they used a control code that was already "close" to S.O.P.

Since almost all of our operating software today is a descendent of Unix, Mac, or MS operating SW, we are stuck with the line ending confusion.