Binary package hint: coreutils
I know this is going to be weird, but...
I'd very much like it if tools like md5sum handled files with CRLF terminators better. I just tried checking a set of files using an .md5 summary generated on windows, and it doesn't work.
(1) This is really annoying. It took me five minutes to figure out that it was the line terminators that were the problem. This was compounded by the fact that neither "cat", "vi" nor "gedit" show any sign of the distinction by default.
(2) This kind of issue is never going away, and it'll only grow with more people using both systems. Already most tools, including almost every text editor, do this by default.
(3) It's more than annoying: I intended to write a script that (among many other things) checks such files often. If I need to check the line terminators myself, it's going to take several times more effort. (Well, at least double the amount.) And this will have to be done for all such scripts.
(4) In the case of md5sum, there really is no excuse not to accept the other kind of terminators. The syntax of the .md5 files is _very_ easy to parse, CRLF terminators never change in any way the semantic, and reading the .md5 files is a negligible effort compared with actually checking the hashes, so there's no "inefficiency" problem. There's no chance of backwards incompatibility, as long as output always uses the same terminators it used to.
(5) The current errors shown for such files are nonsensical. (More precisely, they don't indicate the problem unless you're already familiar with it.)
This feature request is written for md5sum because that's where I had a problem, but I'm sure this applies for many other core utils.
confirmed in feisty (coreutils 5.97)