2.1. Text Nuances

Tabs and Whitespace

There is a special character called "Tab" whose ASCII value is 9. It is usually displayed as several adjacent whitespace characters.
In some file-types (most notably Makefiles) tabs have a special meaning and cannot be substituted with their equivalent whitespaces.
They would even reject a whitespace before the tab. (which often looks identical to a tab).
Thus it is important to make sure your editor is configured so it inputs tabs at such files.

On Linux and other UNIX systems, the lines of text files are terminate with a single character called "Newline" or "Linefeed".
In DOS, and Windows, the Linefeed character is preceded by another character called Carriage Return.
The problem is that some Linux tools will not tolerate CRs at the end of lines, so they have to be removed somehow.
You can use the following command: perl -pi -e 's/\r$//' [files] to convert files from DOS-style to Windows-style.