newline

character, jargon /n[y]oo'li:n/ Line feed or other

character sequence used to terminate a line of text.

Unix uses line feed as its text line terminator - a

Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism. Interestingly

(and unusually for Unix jargon), it is said to have originally

been an IBM usage. Though the term "newline" appears in

ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general

computing world before Unix. The encoding of line feed as

"n" in C and Unix strings comes from this name.

The term has been used more generally for any end of line

character, character sequence (e.g. crlf), or operation

(like Pascal's writeln procedure or Lisp 1.5's terpri)

required to terminate a text record or separate lines.

[Jargon File]

(1997-07-14)