Linebreaks shouldn't scare the Perl interpreter too much (except with comments), but here's my XP with the troubles Windows pc's have when confronted with Unix textfiles:

They'll appear as one long line in programs like Notepad, with their original linebreaks displayed as a couple of black block-like character.

To solve this, there are two solutions:

• FTP in ASCII mode
• Open and Save the file in EDIT.COM (which is, IMHO, the only 'not-entirely-bad' MS program ;-)

To my knowledge, Windows textfiles (with \n\r) display correctly on Unix systems, but there is usually a script to convert to and fro these formats.

> there is usually a script to convert to and fro these formats

Of course, there's always perl:

perl -pi -e 's/\r//' file.txt      # for windows to unix
perl -pi -e 's/\n/\r\n/g' file.txt # for unix to windows
[download]

If you use this frequently under unix, you can alias it to something like:

alias w2u="perl -pi -e 's/\n/\r\n/g' "

Then you'll be able to just do w2u file every time you want to convert a file.

Please note: I haven't been able to check the unix to dos way as I don't have perl installed on my windows machine at home. Please let me know if it doesn't work.

My usual solution is to open in vim on both platforms.
Perl doesn't care about types of white space, so why should my editor?
I'd assume emacs does the right thing as well.