"It seems like the issue is awk specific under Cygwin. I tried a few different things and it seems that awk is silently treating replacing \r\n with \n in the input data."
See stack overflow ticket #24251296 titled: does-awk-cr-lf-handling-break-on-cygwin Unfortunately the spam filter rejects links to stack overflow (already a spam filtered site) On Linux (good, we have cr and nl) $ echo $'line1\r\nline2'|awk 1|od -a 0000000 l i n e 1 cr nl l i n e 2 nl 0000015 On Cygwin or MSYS (bad, we have only a cr) $ echo $'line1\r\nline2'|awk 1|od -a 0000000 l i n e 1 nl l i n e 2 nl 0000014 -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple