Allegedly, on or about 22 July 2016, Patrick O'Callaghan sent:
As Rick has said, it wasn't clear you meant a literal \ n (i.e. a
'\'
and an 'n') rather than the '\n' (ASCII 012) which is the standard
Unix/Linux end-of-line character, but so be it.
I had wondered about the original poster, too. But... If you're going
to do representations of Control + N, etc., for those low-numbered ASCII
control codes, then traditionally its with a carat symbol: ^N
e.g. As displayed by applications giving you an interpretation of a file
contents, such as some hexdump programs. And on-line terminals over
modems, etc.
The slash N representation is more a case of Linux code escaping,
entered using the terminal into some type of editor, more than what's
normally found *in* a text file. Not that /that/ stops any editor from
using such a sequence, if it's also going to be used to interpret the
file when it shows it back to you, particularly file meant to be special
rather than plain text.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64
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Using Windows software is like coating all your handtools with sewage.