Re: carriage return line endings vs. literal ^M in status.m4

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
...
> | +dnl See if CR is the EOL marker.  If not, remove any EOL-related
> | +dnl ^M bytes and escape any remaining ones.  If so, just use mv.
>
> If CR is _not_ the EOL marker, then how would CR appear at the end of the
> line?  Where are we doing input into $tmp/subs1.awk that could create a
> spurious CR if the platform does not use CR?  And if CR is not EOL, then
> do we really need to escape intermediate CR rather than treating it as a
> literal character?

Before writing the patch, I wondered about that too, and did a little
archaeology, but didn't find any good rationale, though I didn't look
very hard.

> And according to this patch, if CR _is_ the EOL marker, then just using mv
> works.  So why not use mv unconditionally?

Assuming the existing CR-conversion code (not just for EOL markers) was
necessary, I thought it best to minimize changes for the common EOL==NL case.