Develop program in Linux to input and output Windows files?

Long story short I want to write a program under a compiler that is available only in Linux, but will operate on Windows files as both input and output. How should I do this? Even though I used to use UNIX many, many moons ago so I know basic UNIX concepts, assume that I'm a Linux newbie.

Is it better to run this compiler under Windows Subsystem for Linux (the version that maintains Windows files compatibility) or in a separate Linux partition?

What about the different newline conventions between Linux and Windows?

How do I pass a filename parameter in a Linux command line e.g. progfoo inputfiles or progfoor inpufiles outputfiles?

What other questions should I have asked, but didn't even know enough to realize it?

Should I be asking this question in a different forum here or on a different website?

garlin said:

If you don't want to write the actual text conversion, pipe thru dos2unix & unix2dos.
% cat dos.txt | dos2unix | myprog | unix2dos > new.txt

Great input. Proof that I need to think of myself as a newbie here.

Then you can read standard input. After you're more comfortable writing your program, find a native function/lib to skip this step.

Two questions:

1. What do you mean by "native function/lib" here?
2. what if I have multiple input files or output files? What if my input files are existing Windows files?

3. Actually a third question. Instead of creating a list of programs as input, could I use a regex that defines the folders and the files within that folder?

I haven't written any software for too many years because my career went in a different direction. (TL;DR) So I'm happy that I now have the time to write software again, even simple programs.

garlin said:

You didn't mention the compiler language.

It's Iron Spring PL/1, running on Linux. Why PL/1? Because that's what I used to use a lot and still remember, plus I have all the original IBM manuals for their PL/1. With PL/1, I can get productive right away. With C++ or Python there is a steep (for me) learning curve. I've done the tutorials, but that's just a start.

Many Windows-based languages have some built-in or contributed function to perform UNIX<->DOS conversion, as that's fairly common.

If you find a CR/LF routine that works for you, then you can tackle argument passing. Most langs have the equivalent to args.

Another choice is PowerShell which has a lot of high-level routines to do pattern matching on folders & files, and does foreach's in a UNIX-like manner. And it does the expected $args thing.

Same issues with PowerShell vs. ordinary regex. I know regex, but not PowerShell.