Hi all,

I am just starting out in LINUX and I know the basic commands but I am a having a problem. I scoped the man pages but I can't get it. Maybe one of know... Can anyone tell me the cmd to figure out the system a file was created on? I just can't figure out this problem. If anyone here can help, it would be great. Thank you

Try Try "man file" for more details.

'Hope that helps...

AFAIK generally neither the name nor the OS type of the system used to create a file are preserved when it is copied to a Linux system. A Linux file consists of an inode and data (actually the data for small files may be kept in the inode and multiple inodes are used for large files). Unless the information you want is written into the data by the application that created the file it will not be available because it is not contained in the inode.

See the stat(1) and stat(2) commands for more information about what is in an indode.

I tried file myfile and I get the type of file but not the system. Catkin says that you can't get that info but my professor insists that you can. Does it make a difference to know that the file I want to examine is a .c file? Thank you.

Yes, assuming it is C source code, in which case it is a plain text file typically manually generated and thus generally has no embedded information about the name of the system it was generated on.

Is it possible that your professor is thinking about line ends? On DOS and Windows, ASCII "carriage return" and "line feed" are used for line end while Linux uses "line feed" only. The fromdos (and dos2unix?) command can be used to convert.

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Got it!! It makes sense Catkin. Thank you very much!

It's quite a common "exam" question to ask a variation of that, I think I had one which asked why the length of two files were different, one on linux, one on unix. The answer of course being that the windows file was using an extra for every line!
If you ever need to try and find out some info about a binary file then you can use the "strings" command and sometimes extract some useful information. I remember someone once releasing an application with a hard-coded password in it - we were able to use strings and pull it straight out of there!