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Given a file contains ASCII characters is there anyway to determine the operating system of origin?

This needs to work regardless of the existence of newline characters

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  • I am willing to be proven wrong and I'm not confident enough to make this an actual answer, but I would say no. That is kind of the point of cross platform standards.
    – EBGreen
    Sep 15, 2014 at 15:13
  • No; Its not possible. An program can write a text file like you describe in any number of ways. I could write a program that ran on ANY operating system and the output file would be identical.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 15, 2014 at 15:14
  • The only thing about the origin if a file I can think of, is 'creation time'. that might be an avenue to look down if at the binary/hex level it's distinctive to an OS, and even after a copy, but I doubt it. don't get your hopes up
    – barlop
    Sep 15, 2014 at 15:20
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    Out of curiosity, why does this even matter to you? What problem are you trying to solve by being able to detect this? Sep 15, 2014 at 16:13

1 Answer 1

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No Way.

The most would be Windows uses \r\n and unix \n, And even then, you can write a file with *nix line endings in Windows and vice versa. but if no new line characters.. no way.

You can't see the origin of the file, there's no tag of any kind

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