CR LF means "Carriage Return, Line Feed" - it's a DOS hangover from the olden days from when some devices required a Carriage Return, and some devices required a Line Feed to get a new line, so Microsoft decided to just make a new-line have both characters, so that they would output correctly on all devices.
Windows programs expect their newline format in CRLF (\r\n
). *nix expect just LF data (\n
). If you open a Unix text document in Notepad on windows, you'll notice that all of the line breaks dissapear and the entire document is on one line. That's because Notepad expects CRLF data, and the Unix document doesn't have the \r
character.
There are applications that will convert this for you on a standard *nix distro (dos2unix and unix2dos)