Hello everyone,

Whenever I copy programming files from windows XP to Fedora 11, leading spaces are being added to a number of the lines in the files. I am using mercurial for revision control and it is coming back and telling me that all the files in the repositories have been modified because of this.

Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks,

Metropolis

What tools are you using to create and copy the files, also to read on Linux?
It sounds like a tab char is converting to an equiv num of spaces.
Have you also allowed for the different line ending conventions?
In MS it's <CR><LF>, in *nix it's just <LF>, hence the dos2unix and unix2dos tools.

Yeah I think you are right about the tabbing changing to spaces. I use netbeans for my IDE, and I just copied them from one hard drive to another. The weird thing though is that the formatting is getting messed up before I ever open the file. Right once I copy the file to Fedora, mercurial see's a problem.

Metropolis

How are you doing the copy? I don't think it's cp, is it?

No im just dragging from one hard drive to the other

Ok I think I fixed the formatting issue. In netbeans I made the tabbed space be the same as the indent space for both windows and linux. I believe that linux reads the tabbed spaces differently.

However, mercurial is still coming back and telling me that every file has been modified, but it does not show that there are any changes in any of the files. It seems as if the binary code of the file is being changed, but its not affecting the format. Why would the binary code of the file change across platforms?

Metropolis

Does mercurial examine any of the file meta-data? Last accessed/modified time? That's the only thing that will|should change.

Thats a very good question....And i would not be surprised if your right about that being the problem......Only thing is, how to fix that....

Metropolis

Heres another thing. If I copy the files from Windows to Linux, I get the modified problem. If I copy them from Linux to Windows there is no problems.

Metropolis

Just to let anyone know who is having this problem. I found that if you FTP your repo's from the windows machine in binary mode to a server, and then FTP them to your linux machine, it fixes this issue. Thanks to everyone that tried to help.

Metropolis

^
Wow... that's some workaround

Samba right?

Hey, its works, its not that hard to do and im happy


Metropolis

"Programming files" are presumably "plain text" files. You'd expect them to be just that but it's a little more complicated, thanks to microsoft.

Some background:

Windows and *nix handle text files differently (a bit the same as windows chose "\" to be the separator for file paths, when the established convention was already "/").

A windows End Of Line (EOL) is CRLF
A *nix EOL is just LF

So "plain text" files from (windows) notepad have an extra character when imported to *nix.

These problems can be solved with the utilities dos2unix filename and unix2dos filename which convert the EOL character(s) appropriately.

Here endeth the history lesson.

I actually think that FTPing the files would be easier then going through all of my folders and trying to fix all the files. I have alot of files to keep up with, so it just seems easier to FTP the whole folder and be done with it.

Also, as I said before. I fixed the spacing issues with Netbeans. The problem Im still having is that Mercurial is saying all of my files have been modified, but they dont show any changes, which I believe nowonmai may be right about the last modified data changing. I just have no idea how I would get Mercurial to not pay attention to this, or why it would make any difference when I copy it from Windows to Linux.

Metropolis