Macintosh and VAX : <CR>
UNIX : <LF>
3. As mentioned above, text files are often compressed to save space. This means that you need a program to uncompress them before you read them—and that you have to transfer them in BINARY mode.
The most common compression programs and common file extensions are:
IBM PC and compatibles : PKZIP and PKUNZIP (.ZIP)
Macintosh : Stuffit and UnStuffit archives (.sit)
UNIX : compress and uncompress (.Z) and tape archive (.tar) with both together being most common (.tar.Z or .taz). Note capital "Z".
UNIX also has the gzip/gunzip command pair. gzip files usually have the extension ".z" (*small* z) or ".tgz" if they are also tape archive files.
Fortunately you can usually find free software for you computer that will uncompress formats from other computer models. For current information on compression software, see the FAQ for the newsgroup comp.compression (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/xxx).
4. Conversely, sometimes binary files are converted to a sort of ASCII that looks like gibberish so that they can be mailed or transferred in TEXT mode—but again you need a program that translates them back to binary. Sometimes we encounter the ultimate absurdity, a text file that is compressed then re-encoded as ASCII for mailing. Actually this makes sense if a large number of related text files are stored in a compressed "archive".