editing linux conf files on windows?

[Humberto Rodriguez]

To add something to the excellent explanation given to you by Tim, let
me tell you how I do it. 

I use Samba.  Samba allows you to map a drive letter to the remote
Unix machine and reach it from your Windows machine as if it were a
drive in your own computer.  That way, from my Windows computer, I
open a file in my Unix server, lets say for example, from my text
editor, I open t:\home\abc\cgi-bin\whatever\myscript.pl then edit it
and save it with Unix line endings.  It is as easy as editing a file
in Windows.  Similarly, I may create a new Unix file in the server.  I
could also copy files to and from the server, as easily as copying
from one folder to another.  I never use FTP.  Samba usually comes
with Linux.

Using Telnet, I take care of the permissions.  You could also do it
with SSH or FTP, but I use Telnet.

Beware however, that both Telnet and Samba are security risks and need
to be restricted.  I have mine restricted only to certain static IPs.

HTH,

Humberto


-----Original Message-----
From: blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:blinux-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Tim Chase
Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2006 9:07 AM
To: Linux for blind general discussion
Subject: Re: editing linux conf files on windows?

> hello is there a windows text editor that will save and
> edit conf files eg I want to log in via sftp grab a conf
> file from linux box configure it on windows then save it
> in the unix format that it came in put it back in the dir
> on my linux box there a editor that I can edit my conf
> files with?

You've got a couple options:

1)  you can ssh into the remote box and edit it with a linux 
editor.  This is usually the approach I take, and it works 
quite well for me.

2)  you can do as you describe, and FTP the file, then use a 
Unix-aware editor on Windows, and then FTP the file back. 
In addition to the editors mentioned by Humberto, there's 
vim/gvim.  The nice thing about learning this beast is that 
it runs on both Windows and Linux (and BSD, and MacOS, and...)

3)  you can use a network/sftp aware editor.  Vim has the 
"netrw" plugin which allows you to directly edit files over 
FTP, SFTP, HTTP, DAV, RCP, rsync and others.  There's plenty 
of online help in Vim on the netrw plugin at

	:help netrw

I'm afraid, being a vim-user, I don't know of any other 
editors that allow this.  I presume emacs can do the same, 
but I wouldn't know where to start, using it.

4)  lastly, you can do exactly as you're currently doing, 
only exploit FTP's built-in ability to do DOS-to-UNIX 
line-ending conversion.  If you FTP the file in ASCII mode 
(rather than BINARY mode), it will translate the 
line-endings to your local (Windows) scheme.  You can then 
edit the file with whatever editor you like.  Then, when you 
FTP it back, just make sure that it's in ASCII mode again, 
and FTP will do the translation from DOS line-endings to 
UNIX line-endings as it uploads the file

Hope this gives you some options to explore on how to work best.

-tim



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