What are carriage return, linefeed, and form feed?

Question

What is the meaning of the following control characters:

1. Carriage return

2. Line feed

3. Form feed

Answer 1

On old paper-printer terminals, advancing to the next line involved two actions: moving the print head back to the beginning of the horizontal scan range (carriage return) and advancing the roll of paper being printed on (line feed).

Since we no longer use paper-printer terminals, those actions aren't really relevant anymore, but the characters used to signal them have stuck around in various incarnations.