alt Hacker NewsGoing all the way back to the earliest C compilers on DOS. There was a decision made to make “\n” just work on DOS for portability of Unix programs, and to make the examples from the C programming book just work.
But in Unix “\n” is a single byte, and in DOS it is 2. So they introduced text and binary modes for files on DOS. Behind the scenes the library will handle the extra byte. This is not necessary in Unix.
I used to have to be careful about importing files to DOS. Did the file come from Unix?
Linefeed (\n) is a single byte in DOS as well.
I think you are talking about carriage return linefeed pair (CRLF or \r\n),
These control codes go back to line printers. Linefeed advances the paper one line and carriage return moves the print head to the left.