Command Linux
Command Linux
files), while others are rather simple. One of the earliest and simplest is called
ASCII text. ASCII (pronounced "As-Key") is short for American Standard Code for
Information Interchange. This is a simple encoding scheme that was first used on
Teletype machines to map keyboard characters to numbers.
Text is a simple one-to-one mapping of characters to numbers. It is very compact.
Fifty characters of text translates to fifty bytes of data. It is important to
under-stand that text only contains a simple mapping of characters to numbers. It
is not the same as a word processor document such as one created by Microsoft Word
or LibreOffice Writer. Those files, in contrast to simple ASCII text, contain many
non-text elements that are used to describe its structure and formatting. Plain
ASCII text files contain only the characters themselves and a few rudimentary
control codes such as tabs, carriage returns and line feeds.
Throughout a Linux system, many files are stored in text format and there are
many Linux tools that work with text files. Even Windows recognizes the impor-tance
of this format. The well-known NOTEPAD.EXE program is an editor for plain ASCII
text files.