next up previous
Next: Handouts Up: APS105S Home Previous: Lab Assignments

For People with Floppy Disks

The Sun workstations in SF1106 have floppy drives. You can access the disk by using the Mtools utilities. To get more info, type the command
 
man mtools
 
to the unix prompt to get a list of all the commands. For example, the command
 
mcopy a:FOO.TXT unixfoo.txt
 
will copy a file from the disk called FOO.TXT to a unix file called unixfoo.txt.

DOS text files end a line with two characters <carriage return> and then a <newline>. The <carriage return> causes the cursor to move to the beginning of the line and the <newline> tells it to go to the next line. If you have seen an old typewriter (fewer of you now, I bet), you can see where these terms come from. In unix systems, only the <newline> is needed to do both functions, so the <carriage return> character is not needed. To get rid of the <carriage returns>, you can run
 
dos2unix unixfoo.txt > fixedfoo.txt

I am told that there is also an option to save your file in unix format.



Jonathan Rose
Mon Apr 13 15:01:04 EDT 1998