I have a need to use readLines to read just the first line of a file and do some processing on that, and read and re-read ?readLines and did not see any mention of whether the actual end-of-line character (LF, CR/LF or CR) is included as part of the returned character vector or not. I just tried it and and it seems that it strips the EOL characters - so it is obvious as soon as one tries it, but I was hoping that it should be mentioned ?readLines (e.g. "The actual EOL character(s) are striped and not included as part of the returned character vector"). The reason why I was specifically looking for that information is that, in perl, the line-input operator, <file> , returns character vectors with the EOL included, and is opposite to that of R. I know I cannot compare apple with orange, and R's readLines() behavior is obvious as soon as one tries it, but an explicit sentence in the help page would be nice... HTL