This has been asked a dozen times already, but the answer is always “see what type of file vi says it is and deduce from that” or “run it through cat and see if the windows line endings are rendered” or “run it through egrep to see if egrep finds instances of one type of line ending or another”.
Is there not a reasonably easy way to just directly view which characters are used? Ideally I would just have a flag on cat that spat out escape characters in their human-readbable representation instead of rending them as whitespace.
try ‘od’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Od_(Unix)