mac text files & for line

[Humberto]

Greetings.

This is probably a v. basic question, but my apologies as I'm
relatively new w/ this.

But I am attempting to use <i>for line</i> to iterate through a text
file, but I am working on a Mac and am getting a single block of text.
I assume this is because of the Mac {CR} usage vs. line feed.

Is there a programmatic way to use for line to interpret the carriage
return character as a new line? Otherwise, what are the easiest ways
to be able to force a replacement of the {CR} character w/ the line
feed? I've attempted the method using <i>tr</i>, but receive an
illegal byte sequence error when running the tr '\r' '\n' < file1.txt
> file2.txt command on my Mac.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks!