A
text file (sometimes spelled "textfile": an old alternative name is "flatfile") is a kind of
computer file that is structured as a sequence of
lines of
electronic text. A text file exists within a
computer file system. The end of a text file is often denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an
end-of-file marker, after the last line in a text file. However, on some popular operating systems such as Windows or Linux, text files do not contain any special EOF character.